12 ms·

I may be wrong, but there is a limited capability for doing pumped hydro - you may run out of elevated lakes in a region, and if you want to create new ones the

I may be wrong, but there is a limited capability for doing pumped hydro - you may run out of elevated lakes in a region, and if you want to create new ones then you will affect the environment. A hole in the ground can be dug up everywhere, e.g. next to each single PV plant.

deleted 6y ago
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kleiba 6y ago
With seven orders of magnitude of difference, you'd have to dig a whole lotta holes before hydro has to start worrying about competition on the capacity level.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Compared to energy loss over distance, which you don't really have if you dig your hole right next to you, it's more like 6 orders of magnitude, maybe less. But maybe capacity is only part of the story. What about locality? Distributed energy storage may not be as efficient, but it has a lot of other benefits.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Many of these projects also falsely assume that there are enough abandoned mineshafts or other types of holes to convert into a battery storage system. They have to do this because you would see through the scam immediately. Digging a wide and deep hole is expensive and not economic unless there is something valuable at the bottom of the hole. There is also the fact that weights are expensive relative to the energy they can store so you have to take them directly from nature (usually via dams or pumping water uphill).
- andbberger 6y ago
  Right, the thing to worry about is power, not energy. Ideally the pumps would be sized to fill/drain lake Powell in 12 hours. Which is ludicrous. The turbines in the Glenn Canyon Dam have a max (output) capacity of 890m^3/s [0]. It would take just over a year to drain the reservoir through them. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/2016*/http://www.gcrg.org/bqr/6-1/glencanyon.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2016*/http://www.gcrg.org/bqr/6-...
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    Which is fine, as many regions have a strong seasonal availability of renewables. Storing energy for some months will be required to go fully renewable. There are also short term storage requirements, over the course of a day or a week.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kleiba 6y ago

With seven orders of magnitude of difference, you'd have to dig a whole lotta holes before hydro has to start worrying about competition on the capacity level.

kbenson 6y ago
Compared to energy loss over distance, which you don't really have if you dig your hole right next to you, it's more like 6 orders of magnitude, maybe less. But maybe capacity is only part of the story. What about locality? Distributed energy storage may not be as efficient, but it has a lot of other benefits.
imtringued 6y ago
Many of these projects also falsely assume that there are enough abandoned mineshafts or other types of holes to convert into a battery storage system. They have to do this because you would see through the scam immediately. Digging a wide and deep hole is expensive and not economic unless there is something valuable at the bottom of the hole. There is also the fact that weights are expensive relative to the energy they can store so you have to take them directly from nature (usually via dams or pumping water uphill).
andbberger 6y ago
Right, the thing to worry about is power, not energy. Ideally the pumps would be sized to fill/drain lake Powell in 12 hours. Which is ludicrous. The turbines in the Glenn Canyon Dam have a max (output) capacity of 890m^3/s [0]. It would take just over a year to drain the reservoir through them. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/2016*/http://www.gcrg.org/bqr/6-1/glencanyon.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2016*/http://www.gcrg.org/bqr/6-...
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Which is fine, as many regions have a strong seasonal availability of renewables. Storing energy for some months will be required to go fully renewable. There are also short term storage requirements, over the course of a day or a week.