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Hawaii's small and disconnected electric grid is being challenged by growth in net metering solar installations.
Background:
Energy Act of 2005 states utilities must accept customer solar power and the customer be compensated.
With more solar, the utility company becomes a distributor and grid maintainer - for free! Not only that, but a utility that once had a hand full of throttles to control the steady load from customers, now is dealing with 1000s of sporadic power sources, requiring purchasing and maintaining equipment to deal with this. Lower profits and higher operating costs = bankruptcy.
Not even maybe. Solar is pretty predictable and steady throughout the day. Hawaill can mix some Wind in and help balance. They can even do some Volcano / Ocean thermal. They even started the trend towards Solar Thermal Air Conditioning that is slowly coming to the mainland.
see -- Sopogy.com
Rough thing about Hawaii (and all most islands) is Diesel (think VERY expensive) Generators are usually the historic base load source. The most expensive option is what their legacy system was built on.
The more daytime / primetime source that can be switched over to renewable, the better they will be. Leave the Diesel off except for when they need them.
Anyway -- backs towards the start -- does this mean bankruptcy for the legacy system? Not likely. I would love to be the guy(s) running such a system. Do a Time-Of-Use and Demand based metering system and is pretty much a self-filling piggy bank.
Look up Hawaiian Electric Industries on the stock market. Their revenues are growing at about 15-20% per year and they are profitable. They are also a regulated utility, which means it's VERY difficult for them to go bankrupt.
Good to hear, DC. Maybe the capital and/or bank interest saved on purchasing another power plant will smartly be spent on upgrading their utility grid.
Still, they are on path to evolving from a power provider to a distributor/ grid operator . I want to solve the argument if the majority of customers gets solar panels, where is the profit to continue business.
Many Utilities have sold their generating facilities and concentrated on purchasing electricity and reselling it via their distribution system to local customers’. This allows them to recover capital for other investments and to shop around for the lowest cost electricity. They have to buy electricity from solar and wind installations but they resell that energy at a profit somewhere else on their system.
If the Hawaiian system has excess daytime energy it should consider building a pumped storage hydro station to store and release the excess energy. As Hawaii has both mountains and water this should not be all that difficult.
Taking an electric utility to bankruptcy requires an extraordinarily inept management probably focusing on very short term profit at the expense of long term profitability. Actually a bankruptcy that removes the current management may be exactly what this company requires.
The only electric utility bankruptcies I'm aware of have been triggered by investments in large central station generation that either was never completed, as in the case of several nuclear plants, or when completed was not needed and their was no mechanism to recover the money invested. I see no sign that Hawaiian Electric is either poorly managed or in any financial trouble. This entire thread seems to be someone's fantasy.
The only electric utility bankruptcies I'm aware of have been triggered by investments in large central station generation that either was never completed, as in the case of several nuclear plants, or when completed was not needed and their was no mechanism to recover the money invested. I see no sign that Hawaiian Electric is either poorly managed or in any financial trouble. This entire thread seems to be someone's fantasy.
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Changing utilites
