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Hydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.
by thrownaway2424 11y ago
Hydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.
- chc 11y agoDoesn't hydro require certain preconditions that are not true everywhere?
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoGenerally, yes, very much so. Technically, no. Artificial hydro (more commonly known as pumped storage) means you can essentially store energy in gravity, anywhere. i.e. build a container at an elevated position, pump water into it using intermittent energy (e.g. wind at night, excess solar etc), drop water down through a turbine to generate electricity again to provide a low baseload. The reality is that 1) this is hugely expensive and so generally pumped storage is restricted to exploit existing natural resources with lots of elevated mountains between which one can store ridiculous volumes of water rather than build your own giant water container. So generally hydro is limited to existing water resources (e.g. large rivers), or storage resources (e.g. mountains) which are quite limited.
- karlshea 11y agoHydro's problem (along with wind and solar) is transmission requirements. Not everyone lives near a location where hydro is feasible. It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere. Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoHydro doesn't have to be large scale. If you can have small-scale wind and solar, you can have small-scale pumped storage, too.
- karlshea 11y agoSure, it doesn't have to be large scale. But you brought it up as a replacement for base load nuclear, which small-scale pumped storage isn't going to do.
- sjwright 11y agoYou want to talk about failure modes? The nuclear "worst case" has nothing on hydro. Hydro power is responsible for the most fatal electricity generation incident ever: Banqiao Dam. It catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people. Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.
- gus_massa 11y agoLink for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam > According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. Video with computer simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPLXim9WG8
- Turing_Machine 11y agoIndeed. Imagine what would happen if the Three Gorges Dam were to fail. There are over 360 million people living downstream of that one.
- sliverstorm 11y agoChrist. That's five percent of the entire world population.
- sliverstorm 11y agoChrist. That's five percent of the entire world population at the mercy of a single dam?