Tokelau Becomes First Country To Go 100% Solar

First time accepted submitter zonky writes "Tokelau has become the first country in the world to go 100% solar power generation, moving away from their entirely diesel power supply, which formerly supplied the energy needs of the 1400 residents of their small south pacific Island Nation. From the article: 'All three atolls in the South Pacific dependency, a New Zealand territory, will have their own solar power system by the end of October, despite a slight delay switching on the first system.'"

Re:Hawii

[erice]

And how do Hawaii's income levels compare with the national average? I'm guessing it's on the higher side.

Although the 2003 median income of $71,320 for a family of 4 in Hawaii was higher than the national figure of $65,093, this is still below the amount required to maintain the same standard of living for a family of 4 in Hawaii as elsewhere in America [alternative-hawaii.com]

not a country

[YesIAmAScript]

It's a territory of NZ.

And it's apparently not at all on solar yet, the first system turns on in two weeks, the last in October.

I'm not even going to grouse about the 3 cars that run on fossil fuel, because that's peanuts next to the fact that the country won't even have power 24 hours a day (article says 12-18h).

This article is just plain wrong.

Re:Cost

[hankwang]

"Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel."

This argument gets really old. Maybe you can provide that number yourself, with a reference. The 1st time I looked it up (ca 2003), energy parity was reached in 1-2 years depending on the local insolation.

Re:Hawii

[sumdumass]

http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/state/hawaii [bestplaces.net]

According to that page, the cost of living is over 75% higher then average for the US mainland. I was told when i vacationed there 20 some years ago, it was because everything is shipped in.

Re:not a country

[AmiMoJo]

You are reading it wrong. Currently they don't have electricity 24/7 because they don't run the generators all night. Once solar is running they will have electricity available all the time thanks to battery storage.

It also means they are not reliant on incoming shipments of diesel to keep the lights on, and their power system is now distributed and far more redundant than when it was reliant on a small number of generators.

Overall this is a huge upgrade for them.

"A lot of maintenance"

[Kupfernigk]

I think last year I had to hose off some bird poop once. And nobody I know has had an inverter fail. I would just mod you down, but I'd like to call attention to the fact that solidraven is full of bird poop.

Re:pointless achievement

[AK Marc]

They spent about $2,000,000 a year on fuel. They won't anymore.

Re:Cost

[thegarbz]

Sorry but that's a load of crap. Solar panels don't require any maintenance unless you live in a very dirty environment and even cheap inverters will still outlive the return on investment duration. If your inverter breaks more often then once every 5 years then you need to seriously question about what brands you buy.

Also you've clearly never lived on a small island in the pacific have you? I have. The expectation was quite simple. At 10pm the power went out. If we were lucky there would be blackouts at dinner time too. This isn't some high tech civilisation who cry bloody murder when their broadband connection goes down.

Also cost effective is not questionable, not in the slightest. The case has been made. The plant cost $7.5m the annual expenditure on diesel is $1.8m. It would be paid off within 4 years without any kind of subsidy or assistance, except in this case the NZ government is providing the money. The country has just managed to pocket $1.8m / year which is 2/3rds of their national budget. That sounds like cost effective to me.

Re:Hawii

[Rei]

It's trying, but there's a number of roadblocks, mostly regulatory. There's a big paperwork backlog - 3/4ths of the permit applications in Honolulu are for rooftop solar installs. Also, it was just recently that they overturned the law banning more than 15% of the grid's capacity to be from home rooftops without getting an explicit exception (it's now 25%). Before that, you had to do a long interconnect impact study for each install. Getting paid for sending power back into the grid is fairly new itself, less than a year old. On the commercial side, the utilities are building most of their new capacity as renewables, but they don't want to toss away their investment on older generation hardware. So overall it's just moving at a snail's pace.

Re:Hawii

[cvtan]

Lots of low-income people in Hawaii. Schools are cash starved. Go to the library in Mountain View and you will find computers that should be in a museum. Watching tourists spend money in Honolulu gives a false impression. People I know with solar power do it for green "feel-good" reasons, not to save money. Many wind turbines on the southern point of the Big Island stand idle and rusting. The geothermal energy plant suffers reliability problems, has not expanded much and is required by contract to sell electricity at the same rate as the oil-fired generated plants.

Re:Hawii

[Rei]

Among other reasons, it's faced opposition from native Hawaiians. [hawaiinewsdaily.com] Drilling into Pele and all that...