Tesla Proposes Microgrids With Solar and Batteries To Power Greek Islands (electrek.co) 85
Tesla is proposing ways to modernize the electric grid of Greece's many islands in the Mediterranean sea with microgrids and renewable energy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. "Several Greek islands are relatively remote and rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their electric grid," notes Electrek. From the report: The Greek Minister of Environment and Energy, Mr. George Stathakis, confirmed last week that they have met with Tesla to discuss the deployment of microgrids in Greek islands. They issued the following statement (translated from Greek via Capital.gr): "[...] The extremely interesting thing that emerged from the meeting is that technological progress has now significantly reduced the cost of energy storage. At the same time, successful competitions for new RES investments in Greece, led to an equally significant reduction in the cost of energy production. As a result, the conversion of the islands to RES, apart from being environmentally useful, is now also economically viable. In this context, cooperation with Tesla can prove to be extremely beneficial, as the American company officials have highlighted, showing strong interest in the initiatives promoted by the Ministry for 'smart' and 'energy' islands."
Tesla has reportedly already suggested a pilot project to demonstrate their microgrid system in the region. The government would like it to be on the island of Limnos. The idea is to install a large solar array and combine it with an energy storage facility to store the excess energy during the day and use it at night when the sun is not shining.
Tesla has reportedly already suggested a pilot project to demonstrate their microgrid system in the region. The government would like it to be on the island of Limnos. The idea is to install a large solar array and combine it with an energy storage facility to store the excess energy during the day and use it at night when the sun is not shining.
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When the sun is not shining (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if the average IQ of Slashdot readers has gone down in the last decade I think everyone knows what "night" means.
Thanks, dumbass.
Re:When the sun is not shining (Score:4, Funny)
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The sun is never shining (locally) at night. It's literally part of the definition of night. timeanddate.com has a lot of info on when is it day, when is it civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight and night. If the sun is still shining at solar midnight, congrats, you don't have night. Check out timeanddates day/night cycle for something like Alert, Nunavut, Canada, right now they don't have day, and in June they don't have night.
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Even if the average IQ of Slashdot readers has gone down in the last decade I think everyone knows what "night" means.
Thanks, dumbass.
You overestimate how smart people are. It's degenerated to where they can't even tell what gender they are or which bathroom to use correctly. Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Does Greece have money again then? (Score:2)
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Greece probably can apply for EU green energy loans or something.
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In theory yes. In practice no.
The last project was something like a 200 MW wind park on an island.
They pocketed the money, build the wind park but never connected it to the grid. They claimed: the money was for the wind park, not to actually make it operational.
They are for many tricking very far down on the queue for receiving any payments. Don't let me talk about the island with 10,000 inhabitants from which 6,000 unfortunately were blind ....
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The last project was something like a 200 MW wind park on an island. They pocketed the money, build the wind park but never connected it to the grid.
Citation needed.
This sounds like one of those "made up facts" since connecting it to "the grid" is cheap and produces free money (the value of the electricity). Indeed Googling does not find this "fact" anywhere.
Possibly you are confused by the islands not being connected to the grid because - islands.
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I'm not confused. This one of the cases why the EU and Germany refused to pump more money into Greece. However that was 15 years ago ... no idea about the current status.
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Some nice Germans will be happy to lend them money as long as they buy German manufactured products with it!
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Last time we checked the Greeks were broke.
They have finally recovered last year.
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Last time we checked the Greeks were broke.
Well "Greeks" aren't one homogenous blob. I imagine some Greeks and some Greek governments are broke and some are not/
Also, if the ROI is high enough and the risk low, it shouldn't be hard to get financing.
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Most islands relying on fossil fuels for power spend absurd amounts of money on it. I bet the payback wouldn't be very long at all.
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That's just what they tell the tax authorities.
It's amazing how many luxury cars and swimming pools people who earn nothing can own.
Solar is ideal for the Greek islands (Score:5, Informative)
Solar is ideal for the Greek islands. They have been building wind-power generators on some (e.g. the Cyclades), however the peak energy usage on islands is exactly when the sun is shining hot. The battery requirements should not be that great, especially compared to other scenarios. ;)
I've had a solar roof on mainland Greece for several years now, which, at 10kW nominal (Renesola Virtus II hybrid) was predicted to produce 12-13 MWh/year due to its suboptimal E/W orientation, but it is generating over 14 MWh every year, and some islands are even more sunny from that mountainous area. For something geek-cool check out the bottom of this page [ecuadors.net] to see how my solar roof "perceived" a partial solar eclipse
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Very dramatic ir photos of the eclipse. Nicely done!
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Solar is ideal for the Greek islands.
well yes, but it has been too expensive in the past, over the decades one constant when visiting various countries around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, is that every single building would have a solar panel on the roof, they would be solar-thermal water heaters, because they were cheap and it is an obvious cost saving. These days, as the pricing has improved, I imagine there are a lot of solar-PV panels as well.
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The proper model, is distributed solar, with wind power and of course, sewerage collected and than the methane generated collected to power gas turbines, preferably with the waste heat plumbed to heated pools and spas.
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They could, power Las Vegas, by burning, your superfluous commas.
Missed opportunity (Score:2)
Most of us reading this are probably thinking the same thing - how does someone who's broke pay for some new tech?
Ever since the Greek financial woes began I've been saying that they are missing a huge opportunity in legalising weed, selling it to the huge number of tourists they get each year and reaping the tax from that. They have the perfect climate for growing it.
Nothing would say F.U to their debtors, like Germany, than letting their citizens get high and wasted for two weeks in the sun each year.
This
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You're confusing capital expenditures with current account expenditures. Even with Greece's shitty credit rating they should be able to sell bonds to finance the solar panels. If the economics are right, and it sounds like they are excellent -- expensive to run fossil fuel plants, lots of sunlight, peak consumption matches peak output -- then current account spending will actually fall. They will see short term gains followed up by long term sustainability. Sounds frigging great to me.
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They will enter Greece and build the needed networks. At German prices and the full cost of transport, experts, translation added.
Greek energy users can then pay German loans back with interest as they use solar power.
Re:Missed opportunity (Score:5, Informative)
Most of us reading this are probably thinking the same thing - how does someone who's broke pay for some new tech?
Greece isn't broke. That was 8-10 years ago. Greece recorded a budget surplus (0.6% and 0.8% of GDP respectively) in the past two years. That is with all the debt payments included. Without the debt, Greece's primary surplus last year was about 3.2% of GDP. In 2017, it was 4.2%. So yes, they can pay for new stuff, especially since solar panels and batteries on islands don't need to be necessarily paid for directly by the central government.
Where is the nuclear only crowd? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Where is the nuclear only crowd? (Score:4, Informative)
Where is the nuclear only crowd? Have we finally found a scenario where they won't recommend a nuclear option?
Ok troll...the Greek island grids are small so we can build batteries large enough to backup their tiny grids. And that's a great solution. Doing the same things for CA (or the US or anywhere on a continent really) would be an entirely different proposition requiring the drastic increase (several fold) in global production of the raw materials for whatever type of battery you build. Learn to do math and do some research and you will find quite quickly how stupid the solar/wind only proposals for large countries really are. As for Greece, its a great place to build a solar/wind/tidal only battery backed grid and you don't need to strip mine most of Chile and Australia to do it. Now that's you've trolled the nuclear folks for the day, go get your paycheck [time.com] from the natural gas folks greenie...
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oh, you mean molten salt storage needing that rare earth sodium chloride?
we don't need nuclear any more
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oh, you mean molten salt storage needing that rare earth sodium chloride?
we don't need nuclear any more
First, nobody uses NaCl. They do use floride or chloride salts, but not NaCl as if the Na separates from its ionic bonds, its explosive. Second, conversion to and from molten salts is about 45% each way. So it has the same problem with pumped hyrdo, when you do the 2 conversions (from and back to electricity) you get about 16-20% conversion meaning the power needs to increase in value 5-6x from the time its purchased/generated to the time its used. For comparison, in the CA market the daily swings are a
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Second, conversion to and from molten salts is about 45% each way.
No it is not, idiot!
Heat transfers nearly 100% ... making heat into electricity via a turbine is your 45% (actually less as molten salt is not that warm).
WTF, stop talking about energy, power, electricity or storage ... you have no clue at all!
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You are making things up. sodium chloride indeed is used in some systems mixed with other common salts. Sodium nitrate in others. Potassium salts also used, and you think elemental potassium is safe too? A mixture of lithium nitrate and sodium chloride can be used.
You don't understand thermodynamics either, 70 percent of the thermal energy can be converted to electricity. Sure, not the 90 percent of battery storage, but this is free solar power we're talking about, not something from a fuel that c
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It doesn’t need to be batteries. You could for example pump water to a higher plane during the day with surplus energy, and use a turbine at night when you let it flow down. I understand that something similar is done occasionally with other energy sources.
You understand very little about power apparently. Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion. Electricity to kinetic energy stored in the form of water at a higher elevation. Then capturing back that kinetic energy back to electricity is about 30-40%. So any power you put into your idea, needs to be sold at ~10x the price to make it break even. And that's before you deal with the cost of building an artificial lake and a dam. Even in the warped energy market of CA, price only varie
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The round-trip energy efficiency of Pupmed Storage Hyrdo (PSH) varies between 70%–80%
"Energy storage - Packing some power". The Economist. 2011-03-03. Retrieved 2012-03-11.
Jacob, Thierry.Pumped storage in Switzerland - an outlook beyond 2000 Stucky. Accessed: 13 February 2012.
Levine, Jonah G. Pumped Hydroelectric Energy Storage and Spatial Diversity of Wind Resources as Methods of Improving Utilization of Renewable Energy Sources page 6, University of Colorado, December 2007. Accessed: 12 February 201
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Bath County Pumped Storage Station [wikipedia.org] claims 79% Overall efficiency and Large modern Water Turbines [wikipedia.org] are commonly operating at greater than 90% efficiency.
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You understand very little about power apparently.
And you have no clue at all.
Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion. ...
No it is 99% for floating down effective and something like 95% for pumping up, so we are at roughly 94% efficiency. Idiot
Re:Where is the nuclear only crowd? (Score:5, Insightful)
You understand very little about power apparently. Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion.
Closer to 70%. The New York State Power Authority has been operating pumped storage facilities for power generated in off hours at Niagara Falls for decades. If it didn't make economic sense, they wouldn't be doing it.
BUT the economics only work if you use the facility every day and there are not a lot of sites suitable for pumped storage.in typical terrain.
Google Gilboa-Blenheim for more information on an actual facility that has been in operation for about half a century.
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You're right. It doesn't HAVE to be batteries. There are other energy storage options, but to date only pumped storage has been able to actually deliver acceptable performance -- 70-plus percent efficiency, costs as low as a few cents per kwhr. Problems with pumped storage -- shortage of good sites, storage costs are a function of frequency of use (i.e. it's cheap to store energy for a few hours, not as cheap to store energy for weeks/months), difficult to scale to small installations..
On the bright side
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You don't have to build all required battery capacity overnight though. And I'd point out that going all nuclear, or at least replacing all fossil fuel plants with nuclear, would require a several fold increase in the supply of nuclear fuel and reprocessing too.
At the moment lithium batteries are getting a lot of investment as they can be used for many different things, but for grid scale we will probably want to use other tech like low temperature sodium sulphur too. At this point it's not really a questio
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As for the reference to strip mining whole continents - exactly how much uranium is required to run the whole world on nuclear power for 100 years? What will it cost to do it with unconventional nuclear reactors? Ignore the expense of storing and
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Just like Germany, Greece can contemplate a large renewable energy sector because they have easy and cheap access to nuclear power. They don't have the power plants themselves, but they import from their neighbors.
Re:Where is the nuclear only crowd? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, the islands are quite literally islanded micro-grids that are not connected to the outside world. There are no undersea power cables, instead they rely on diesel/fossil fuel generation.
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Most of the Greek islands already use renewables, and they could work fine on candlelight and wood, as they allegedly have since the times of Homer.
Mod parent Funny!
(emphasis mine)
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We are talking about the islands, idiot.
They are not connected to any mainland or international grid, idiot.
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Fuck off, ignoramus. Poland has how many billions now?
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What has Poland to do with the islands of Greece?
Why are you posting your bullshit here?
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PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Maybe Tesla can work with them, or with alternative energy companies like East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), to help supply power.
Or Tesla might help large numbers of customers get power off the grid, using their solar panels and power walls. (For that to take off, Tesla should lower their prices.)
Good idea, PG&E won't be bankrupt again for at least a month if you force them to buy even more overpriced power they don't want. CA is already completely oversupplied with power generation and doesn't needs more. PG&E is declaring bankruptcy to get out of liability for all the recent wildfires. They know huge settlements are coming against them from the wildfires. That combined with the sweetheart deals they were forced to sign to buy rather expensive solar and wind at losses and its no surpris
replace the batteries (Score:2)
and Tesla gets to replace the batteries every 10 years
win win for Tesla
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Edison batteries have a terrible charge-discharge efficiency. It's 65% under perfectly ideal conditions, and something like 50-55% under actual usage.
Just get the money up front. (Score:5, Funny)
Hi Tesla.
Just get the money up front.
Best regards
The rest of the EU