Hawaii's Kauai island to hit 80% Renewable Power by mid-2020s

This is a very exciting prospect for the island of Kauai as they expect to chart their path to 100% renewable electricity by mid century. With Hawaii's RE policy which encourage healty growth of renewables, Kauai's 80% clean energy ambition would not be difficult to achieve. 

The said project in Kauai is solar-charged water pumping system. This is how it is -- the island is almost entirely powered from RE at midday, and with some battery installed, part of the solar generated energy is stored in the battery bank. As the bank is fully stored, there is excess power that is suitable for pumping water to the reservoir which would then generate hydropower during the peak hours in the evening.

Beauty of Kauai.

View of Hanalei bay and Na Pali range. Photo credit: Steve Heap posted on Matador Network.

"It got to the point where we just didn’t have any more room in our daytime demand to take more solar." - Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, Brad Rockwell

Read more at GTM, link provided below. 

Source: greentechmedia

Kick Start Your 2021 with the NEM 3.0

Happy new year. 

Probably it's not too late to wish you a fruitful 2021 after seeing 2020 busted everyone's expectation with the Covid-19 pandemic. It just reiterate the belief that "a man's plan is not God's".

I was browsing through previous postings and one article popped up as I searched for 'Malaysia solar PV 2020'. In 2017, it mentioned that solar PV industry will generate RM70 billion and 50,000 jobs.

Of course it's obvious that this expectation was no where near achievement due to the 2020 being a year ravaged by cov coupled with the tussle for power.

2021 For Malaysia

Year 2021 looks promising though, with the introduction of NEM 3.0 programme. NEM3.0 consist of:

i) NEM Rakyat (domestic), 

ii) NEM GoMEn (Government Ministries and Entities), and 

iii) NOVA programme (Net Offset Virtual Aggregation).

I was particularly interested with the Program NEM Rakyat after missing out on the previous Feed-in Tariff for domestic consumers. NEM Rakyat is aimed at benefitting the domestic end users, maintaining the existing concept of “one-to-one” offset rate. Total allocated  quota is 100 MW.

It is a shame that NEM Rakyat is only available in Peninsula Malaysia for consumers of TNB.

Why not make it available in Sabah?

Hiatus?

Maybe, not really. Some will argue if a 2-year pause is a short-term hiatus.

Anyway, that two years of absence was a costly one as during that period I lost possession of my domain thegreenmechanics.com. The web-hosting company has now put my domain up for sale at $2,595 which would have been RM10,000 had I decided to put it up for sale before the expiry of my domain's tenure. My blog is now hosted on Google's blogspot until I can find a suitable domain to park it.

I hope to continue blogging again and share some work related experience and stuffs.

Meanwhile....

Our recent activity was hiking at Maragang Hill, Kundasang Sabah.

It was a very refreshing, not-so-challenging hike, or rather a walk I'd say. I will talk about it in more detail later.