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Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. My day job includes designing hydroelectric control systems and even I can admit that. That's a

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. My day job includes designing hydroelectric control systems and even I can admit that. That's a big part of the reason that hydro is a non-starter in much of the western world, which is probably a reasonably good thing (although there are certainly some exceptions where hydro development seems like a no-brainer to me but I digress) What's not so clear to me though, is why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage. These systems are capable of storing massive amount of energy cheaply, safely, and (relative to other methods) efficiently. Every single pumped storage project gets mired in protracted legal battles and they are impossible to build. Our modern energy ecosystem requires more and more storage, and somehow we are under the illusion that we can get there with overgeneration of solar and hooking up batteries. We can't. We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology. This really cannot be enphasised enough - this is the only game in town. The solutions are needed yesterday, and must be built on a massive scale - there is no time for a 20 year R&D to production cycle of a miracle technology. Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining. The only other container that is even worth mentioning is conpressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining. Why is mining a major obstacle, provided it is economical and the environmental costs are some orders of magnitude less than those of climate change?
  - comte7092 4y ago
    The environmental costs of mining are extremely localized and that’s also generally where the permitting takes place.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    New mining permits in the US are magnets for environmental review lawsuits. Depending on the type of mine, getting a new one up and running can take 7-17 years, counting planning, permitting and the inevitable lawsuits. Copper and nickel mine runoff can be extremely toxic, especially to aquatic wildlife and wetlands. Remediation isn't really feasible once the damage is done, so plenty of groups would rather outright ban certain rich deposits from being mined at all than take the risk. How sensitive environments elsewhere in the world fare under mines that aren't subject to safety precautions in the US is apparently an "other people" problem.
  - sydd 4y ago
    Because lots of mined metals come either from 3rd world countries like Congo with no environmental protection laws or are mined in few places like Russia where a trade war can lead to shortages. Hydro requires the most common mayerials like steel or concrete.
    - pencilguin 4y ago
      And, not even concrete. But there are numerous other storage alternatives that also do not need any special materials. We don't know yet which ones will be cheapest.
- retrac 4y ago
  Ontario recently started a pumped hydro facility in an abandoned mine, and it will hold ~400 MWh of power that can be charged or released over several days. Several other sites are in planning, including one that, if it goes forward, will hold 8000 MWh. That could run the entire city of Toronto for many hours. Such facilities should allow Ontario to run on a mix of pure nuclear, hydro and wind. Currently about 15% of the electricity supply in the province is natural gas, used at peak times when demand exceeds the constant output of the nuclear/hydro base. At other times, their surplus is sold at a loss. More pumped storage will smooth this out.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  The only other contender that is even worth mentioning is compressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment. The largest pumped storage station in the US has a storage capacity of 24,000 MWh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... There's an underground hydrogen storage project underway in Delta, Utah with a capacity of 300,000 MWh: https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-project-garners-finalized-504m-doe-loan-guarantee/ https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-proje... It would take 22 Deltas to overtake the world's largest pumped storage plant, a massive Chinese installation with 6.6 terawatt hours of storage capacity: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/04/state-grid-of-china-switches-on-worlds-largest-pumped-hydro-station/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/04/state-grid-of-china-s... Still, potential underground hydrogen capacity is tremendous, amounting to thousands of terawatt hours in Europe alone: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201910.0187/v1 https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201910.0187/v1
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    How does the energy in underground hydrogen get utilized? Is the capacity the combustive energy, or only the energy from the gas pressure?
    - philipkglass 4y ago
      It's burned as fuel in a gas turbine to generate electricity. The process is similar to burning natural gas in turbines, but some equipment adjustments have to be made when running on hydrogen. The Delta project is starting with a 30/70 blend of hydrogen and natural gas, gradually stepping up to 100% hydrogen. Siemens currently has turbines that can burn up to 75% hydrogen and is targeting 100% hydrogen by 2030: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/priorities/future-technologies/hydrogen/zehtc.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/priorities/future-t... General Electric has a variety of gas turbines, accepting 50% to 100% hydrogen in the fuel blend: https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele... Mitsubishi claims to offer turbine operation on up to 100% hydrogen: https://solutions.mhi.com/clean-fuels/hydrogen-gas-turbine/ https://solutions.mhi.com/clean-fuels/hydrogen-gas-turbine/
- deleted 4y ago
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- _hypx 4y ago
  The recent appearance of hydrogen energy storage has basically refuted this argument. We can now store all of the renewable energy we want. The only problem is the lack of awareness among environmentalists and engineers.
  - speakfreely 4y ago
    My limited understanding was that the electrolysis tech is not yet efficient enough at scale to make this feasible. Do you have links where I could read more about the cutting edge in hydrogen production? This is a very fascinating potential tool for solving the "we don't have enough batteries" problem with renewables.
    - _hypx 4y ago
      The lack of awareness I am talking about also applies to electrolysis. The current state of electrolyzer technology is already good enough to do the job. Future advancements will make this a no-brainer. This is similar to the rise of photovoltaics a decade (which also caught many 'experts' by surprise). Some recent advancements: https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/toshiba-claims-hydrogen-breakthrough-with-new-p2g-production-technology https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/toshiba-claims-hy... https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electrolysis/ https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr... https://energynews.biz/idaho-national-lab-and-bloom-energy-produce-hydrogen-at-record-rates/ https://energynews.biz/idaho-national-lab-and-bloom-energy-p...
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The problem with electrolysis was not its efficiency, the problem was capital cost of the electrolysers (so they could be paired effectively with intermittently overproducing renewables.) Efficiency was more of the concern when it was imagined expensive nuclear power would be driving electrolysers 24/7.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Hydrogen leaks like crazy and corrodes storage cannisters. It isnt especially practical.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > this is the only game in town. There is another game in town. Emphasis on "is", as in present tense, not future. Natural gas power plants. They emit much, much less CO2 than coal. If we use them to only generate electricity when solar and wind are not enough, we end up with much lower emissions than what the trees remove from the atmosphere. We also end up needing to overbuild solar and wind by only about 30%, not by a factor of 3 or 4. The capital cost of maintaining the current, existing, natural gas power plants is basically zero. The capital cost of building new pumped storage is huge. Here, let me do it for you. Lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 m requires about 10 Joules (more precisely 9.8, as every high school student hopefully knows). One billion kg, or one million tons is 10 giga-joule, or giga-watt-seconds. Increase to 360 million tons, and you get one GigaWatt-hour. One ton is one cubic meter of water, one million is a square of 1km2 area and 1m height, and 360 megatons is a square of horizontal width and length of 6 km and a height of 10 meters. A fairly big lake. Building an artificial one would qualify as a mega-project. It would cost multiple billions of dollars. It would be able to generate one gigawatt of power for one hour. Of course you'd raise it to a certain height, let's say 100 meters, and that would generate the 1GW of power for 4 days. If you have 100% efficiency. Which you don't have, because you lose energy both when you pump up, and when you let the water come down. Assuming an optimistic 25% overall round-trip efficiency, you get 1GW power for one day. If you want for one month, well, you multiply this by 30. Or you can just keep around a 1GW natural gas power plant, and use it when you need it.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    To explain the economics of pumped storage, you must first understand it. Pumped storage round-trip efficiency is not, in fact, 25%, but routinely above 70%. Nobody pumps water up just 10 meters. It is, instead, pumped (say) a thousand meters up to a reservoir commonly 10 meters deep. A 10m-deep reservoir needs only a cheap earthen dike. A dike is hardly a "megaproject", even if km long. Dikes are low tech. The energy is extracted at the bottom end of a penstock. Each ton of water in a reservoir 1000m up stores 10MJ. One just 100x100x10 meters thus holds 100,000 tons, 1000 GJ, >270 MWh, 6 hours at ~40 MW. Nobody needs 30 days' storage. If your hydro storage runs low, and local fuel tankage looks like it might, too, you order out for LNG or, soon, NH3 or LH2 from solar farms in the tropics. Few would need or want a 1km x 1km reservoir. Smaller ones distributed where the power is needed are more useful. An underground cavity, where it exists, can be used instead of a hilltop reservoir, or with one. Burning NG once in a while is no big deal, but NH3 will be cheaper in the near future.
theptip 4y ago
Since you’re in the industry I’m interested in your perspective on this report from Lawrence Berkeley lab on integrated battery storage for wind/solar projects: https://emp.lbl.gov/hybrid https://emp.lbl.gov/hybrid It seems to me that high capacity integrated battery projects are being built in large numbers, and they are much closer to cost-competitive than I would have though from the general sentiment in the press/HN comments. Obviously they are more expensive than raw solar but still in a price range to be competitive with NatGas OpEx in the next few decades. If that’s true then we might not need to fight the environmental battles on pumped storage (which for the record I do agree could be used more).
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Too little, too late unfortunately. The amount of storage available from these projects is tiny and even though it's accelerating it's not accelerating at nearly the level required for the physics of a primary renewable grid to work. Chemical storage of energy is expensive and requires a long supply chain. It's huge that the costs are trending in a favorable direction and maybe eventually we can do all our load balancing that way but we don't need results 15 years from now, we need them yesterday.
  - theptip 4y ago
    Is this supported by the report though? We have yet to build most of the solar we need, and IIUC almost half of new solar is now being built with storage: > At the close of 2021, there were more than 670 GW of solar plants in the nation’s queues; 285 GW (~42%) of this capacity was proposed as a hybrid, most typically pairing PV with battery storage (PV+storage represented nearly 90% of all hybrid capacity in the queues). This is the surprising fact for me from that report. Of course, “built with some storage” is not the same as “built with 100% storage” but the report shows the distribution is not terrible, with ranges of 50-100% storage being built. (With %age being something like “daily maximum variance from demand curve” but I don’t understand exactly how this is computed).
    - deleted 4y ago
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plorg 4y ago
When I was in school for power systems planning the the accepted notion was that pumped hydro storage is cool and great, but like hydropower, it is extremely geographically dependent, and we have basically developed all of the places where it would work (at least in the US), or at least, by order of magnitude, there are not enough remaining untapped hydro-related resources to make a dent in projected storage demand. Is that a wrong understanding?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  It's geographically dependent if built on rivers. Beyond rivers the possibilities expand enormously.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Entirely wrong. All pumped storage requires is a big high spot and a big low spot*. Take a look at this, for example: https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/ https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/ There are a lot of good pumped storage sites out there. *exaggeration, but close enough.
  - greedo 4y ago
    Unfortunately that rules out a lot of the US Midwest, where coal is a huge source of electricity generation.
    - Animats 4y ago
      That's the US wind belt - the Texas panhandle north to Canada, and east into Illinois.[1] [1] https://www.kgou.org/energy/2013-09-03/oklahomas-wind-energy-transmission-gap-in-two-images https://www.kgou.org/energy/2013-09-03/oklahomas-wind-energy...
  - rocmcd 4y ago
    > All pumped storage requires is a big high spot and a big low spot I think that's what the GP meant by "extremely geographically dependent." Finding a 1,000 ft height difference (using the Gordon Butte Project as an example) between reservoirs will be really challenging in huge swaths of the United States and elsewhere.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
We certainly can use solar, wind & batteries to eliminate fossil fuels from our electricity system. Estimates are that we'd need about 300TWh of batteries, which is on the edge of feasible. Pumped storage would be a lot cheaper, though.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Oh great, only 300TWH of batteries! Let's put in the P.O.! Who is supplying those, again?
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    300TWh of batteries per decade is a lot easier than 90 million barrels of oil per day yet somehow we manage to do the latter.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      At current battery prices of $132/kwh and oil at $88/barrel, 300 TWh of batteries per decade is actually 40% more expensive than 90 million barrels of oil per day.
      - megaman821 4y ago
        Damn, we are that close. We are using expensive, high-density batteries meant for electronics and transportation for stationary storage. CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year. In five years there will be even more grid-targeting battery solutions on the market at low price points.
        scythe 4y ago
        From a practical business perspective, the falling prices of batteries may not be ideal from an investor's perspective. If I buy $100M of batteries and the price drops 50% in five years, I just "lost" 50 million dollars. You'd have to be at a point where the proceeds to storage exceed the depreciation of the product in order to pencil out, I think. So a lot of storage that could be built probably won't be built until the technology war shakes out. >CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year. Tried to look this up, but didn't find anything. Where's that?
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Wind and solar energy also destroy ecosystems, but we don't stop using them. Dams may be more harmful, though.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  What's your definition of destroy and do you have any examples of ecosystems that were destroyed by wind and solar?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Cutting down large swathes of forest and building over the habitats of endangered species happen for both. Solar and wind farms both need large land clearances in areas that have a lot of their respective kind of energy, which animals also use. Solar farms do best in deserts, which tend to be habitats for species that like extreme conditions. Several of them have been blocked in recent years. There was a recent huge solar project that was planned to cover most of the land area that an endangered desert tortoise inhabits. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar/exclusive-sierra-club-sues-over-california-solar-plant-idUSTRE70432N20110105 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar/exclusive-sierra-cl... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/massive-desert-solar-project-experiment-in-tortoise-survival https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/massive... Aside from the large swathes of forest that have to be cut down for wind farms, birds of prey tend to fly into the blades of wind turbines. These are also often endangered species. The fish and wildlife survey estimates 140,000-500,000 bird deaths at wind farms per year, with most of these being birds of prey which have low birth rates and high conservation value (many endangered species). In contrast, cats kill billions of birds per year, but they are common small birds, not endangered predator species. In addition, something like 800,000 bats are killed by wind turbines. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb.260 https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb... The solution, for solar, is obviously installations on top of human structures, like roofs and roads (but not on the road surface, which is silly). For wind, there isn't a good solution that doesn't hurt predator bird populations.
    - 4y ago
99_00 4y ago
Why doesn't hydroelectric pumped storage have the same obvious and massive ecosystem damage as hydroelectric when it is hydro electric + the environmental damage caused by producing solar panels or wind turbines?
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  The difference is because hydroelectric generation depends on currently existing rivers, damming them and turning them into electricity sources has to change the natural ecosystem in the river. For pumped storage, we can essentially build it anywhere there is an elevation change. So we can avoid harming river ecosystems where they naturally exist and create pipes and tanks where it would be the least damaging to the ecosystem
- laverya 4y ago
  Pumped Hydro doesn't have to be built on a river - you just need a pair of reservoirs that you can fill and transfer water between. This obviously destroys the ecosystem of the valley you use, but at least you're not impacting river water temperatures/sedimentation/fish spawning/etc.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    It does not, in fact, need to destroy any ecosystem.
    - laverya 4y ago
      No matter where you put the few cubic kilometers of water that pumped hydro requires, you need to put it somewhere. The ecosystem of that place will then be displaced or destroyed.
      - pencilguin 4y ago
        It does not need more than the tiniest fraction of a cubic km of water. A reservoir can increase scarce habitat for migratory birds, which is commonly much more valuable than your typical bald hilltop.
rr808 4y ago
Agreed we need hydroelectric pumped storage - what is a typical efficiency number for that? I'd think its super inefficient, but not sure what the numbers should be.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  > The round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies between 70%–80%, with some sources claiming up to 87%. For me, that sounds like quite good, given the capacity possibilities. We can always build tiered storage, with smaller, but more efficient tiers (e.g. batteries) used first and PSH when that's filled up or exhausted.
  - rr808 4y ago
    Wow I actually was expecting more like 10-20%.
    - karamanolev 4y ago
      Turbines and pumps can be surprisingly elegant and efficient when built well.
api 4y ago
I've wondered for a while if we couldn't build a pipeline between the ocean and the Salton Sea in SoCal and store quite a bit of energy that way. The Salton Sea is already kind of a wasteland so at least use it for something.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  What is the difference in meters? If not much, the effort of building will not be counterweighted by the energy storage capacity. AFAIK salton sea is pretty much at sea level?
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    It's 72 meters below, but it's not very big, and once it's full you'll have to wait for the water to evaporate away, I assume? If it could be made a permanent bay of the ocean, that might make the area less of a disaster. But it seems real hard...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - api 4y ago
      If it's below then the answer is no, so that answers my question. :) I was assuming it would be above sea level since it's inland.
      - jhoechtl 4y ago
        Actually all.you need is a height difference, the direction doesn't matter. 72 meters is the limiting factor here.
throwaway894345 4y ago
My impression as a layperson is that the economic feasibility of pumped hydro is very location-dependent, and our electrical grid isn't so fungible that storage in one region can meaningfully store energy generated in another region. Is my understanding correct? And if so, how do we tackle that?
- 7952 4y ago
  Pumped hydro is very dependent on location. But the supply of energy would not need to be. Electricity grids and DC interconnectors work really well. Having a few massive sites spread across a continent could work well.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    Pumped hydro is not, in fact, very dependent on location. You just need a hill. There are a lot of hills. Even places without hills often have deep underground cavities, which also serve.
jhoechtl 4y ago
Forgive me my lack of understanding of the englisch language, but I do not understand the distinction you make. Hydroelectricity: Is this power you obtain by placing turbines behind a huge concrete wall of a large river? If so, how is the scenario of building a large concrete dam in the mountains where water is pumped up a hill to covert it into kinetic energy any more better? I understand that hydroelectricity is used to supply the basic power need, say 80% and a water reservoir with turbines to cover power peak needs.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Because you're not disrupting a river's flow and natural ecosystem, you only utilize the watershed some more during the initial filling period. After that, it's a closed system separate from the river ecosystem where only evaporation causes leakage.
  - roamerz 4y ago
    That ship has already sailed as most power producing dams have been around for long time. Removing them would destroy the (now natural) ecosystem they have created. Plus dams have way more benefits to us than the extremely clean energy they produce - not just store.
    - brookst 4y ago
      This is the first time I've seen a claim that dams create ecosystems that we should worry about destroying. As far as I know, they disrupt fish and animal migrations, reduce natural carbon sinks, reduce biodiversity, and block sediment from providing nutrients downstream. Is there any source saying dams create healthy natural ecosystems? A necessary evil I can kind of see, but a net positive for ecosystems? That seems doubtful.
      - whiddershins 4y ago
        I don’t know. I suspect the bias is towards the pre-dam ecosystem so it might be challenging to rationally compare them. Certainly an ecosystem will grow up around nearly any situation.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage Because energy storage is currently not a problem, and consequently not profitable. Unless you have some very bold organization to invest on things that today make negative marginal profit on any scale, or a government rushing into the solution of tomorrow's problem with today's money, you won't see any action. It will certainly turn into a problem at some point (I expect it on this decade already). But even when it happens, it's not clear what kind of storage will be successful; and pumped hydro has a bunch of competitive issues due to its geographic limitations.
- jraph 4y ago
  > Because energy storage is currently not a problem Yes it is. It's one part of the solution to fluctuations in electricity production (renewables: wind, solar) and consumption (day / night, warm / cold). In a grid, at all time, the production has to match the consumption perfectly. You can make the frequency vary a bit to make up for fluctuations, but only so much before damaging things. Storage helps with a production higher than consumption and then with a higher consumption later. Good storage makes grids more flexible and ideally lower the need for electricity production, and costs. I agree with the rest of your comment though.
  - danans 4y ago
    > Yes it is. It's one part of the solution to fluctuations in electricity production (renewables: wind, solar) and consumption (day / night, warm / cold). It both is and isn't a problem, depending on your time scale, and opinions about how we should bridge the variations in supply and demand. Today, on the short timescale (subsecond) this need is called frequency regulation, and we mostly do that with so-called "peaker plants", essentially natural gas turbines that run constantly and feed power onto the grid at subsecond notice. This is a very expensive source of supply (easily 5x the median wholesale rates) because the natural gas is mostly wasted (not to mention the very high CO2 emissions: ~600g/kWh produced [1]). Therefore, there are a lot of companies working toward solutions to this, that don't involve burning fuel, either by building stationary storage, or by aggregating negative demand, thereby participating in a very expensive electricity market with a low-marginal cost solution. In short, this is where the money is today. The next level for storage is not yet a problem, but will be: storing excess renewable energy supply between different parts of the day or week. The value of this service to the climate is massive, but the economic value of this is not enough to justify the cost of Lithium batteries. To support this use case, we need batteries or other storage media that are 10-100x less expensive than Lithium batteries. There are many candidate storage technologies for this use case, from pumped hydro to metal-air batteries, to compressed air energy storage, but no clear winners yet. 1. Estimated based on a rough average of .65tons/MWh for CA peaker plants from: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/California.pdf https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/...
jmclnx 4y ago
In my region of the US, hydro use to power a lot of manufacturing until electricity came in. Canals were built for power, leaving the rivers flow naturally. But these canals are in dis-repair. To me, why not refurb these canals to provide power. There is plenty of water and plenty of places like this in the area.
agumonkey 4y ago
what about artificial hydro ? make a big large raised water retention thing with generators.. it will take space but not harm existing natural spaces. Even in europe there's a lot of unused land.
- zizee 4y ago
  Pumped hydro needs to be truely massive scale, both in the amount of water (read: lots of depth AND surface area), and the height differential between the two reservoirs. To make it cost feasible we really need very favourable natural geography. Building such structures ourselves would be astronomically expensive.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    Pumped hydro does not, in fact, need "lots of depth". 10m is typical, for which cheap earthen dikes suffice. It does not, in fact, need "very favourable natural geography". It needs an elevation difference, something found almost everywhere, Holland and Kansas excepted. Kansas has deep underground cavities, which also suffice. Building dikes is cheap and low tech. Dikes predate written language.
    - zizee 4y ago
      On the depth thing, I really only meant to mean you need lots and lots of water. You could have a shallow basis, and take over a huge area of land, or or smaller amount of land if you have deeper water. Deeper also allows for less evaporation, less land area. Perhaps your and my definitions of favourable geography are different. You need a water source, due to evaporation, you need a big resovoir at elevation, and another lower. If you don't want to build it all yourself you need valleys that you can close off at one end. You need ground that is not permeable, so the water you have stays where you want it. Perhaps I am misreading you, but you seem a bit agitated with your in fact writing style. We're all friends here. I am not anti pumped storage. Far from it. If you can make it work economically, it's a great solution. It will definitely be part of the mix. But there's reasons it's not being rolled out everywhere, and a lot of this is due to cost and unfavorable geography.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
Totally agree on pumped power storage capacity being needed. But those are massive infrastructure projects. Erecting a damn, to store the potential energy is bound to meet resistance. Alternative solution: Build Lots of pressure-piston, that are stable standing on its own. Basically, a pillar of ice, coated in insulation, standing upon a small lake that provides water at pressure. If additional energy is needed after the extraction, heat is added to the system and the lake replenishes, while the piston shrinks. If energy needs to be stored, additional water is pumped on top and frozen. If additional heat reservoirs are nearby or something in need of coolant is nearby, additional heatpump like bonuses should be findable. Similar concepts have been explored: https://energypost.eu/gravity-batteries-any-nation-can-do-it-at-scale-using-rocks/ https://energypost.eu/gravity-batteries-any-nation-can-do-it... but they need massive construction efforts. Instead of having the building up storage provide its own structure, with little more then a concrete base and some grain silo walls. https://i.imgur.com/iCg9LzY.png https://i.imgur.com/iCg9LzY.png The piston sealing the under pressure water, could be archieved via "onion" layers, steps leading down, taking up a part of the pressure, until it drops to "holding back by atmosphere" on the outmost layer.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Pumped-hydro need not, in fact be any sort of "massive infrastructure project".
nostromo 4y ago
> hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems Sure, but compare it with the alternatives. Oil and gas are obviously very destructive of ecosystems. But so are lots of renewables. Here's what a silicon mine looks like (used to make solar panels): https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/anglogold-ashanti-digs-itself-out-of-debt.jpg https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/anglogold-... Here's a lithium mine (used to make batteries): https://assets.telecomtv.com/assets/telecomtv/open-cast-mine-11646.jpg https://assets.telecomtv.com/assets/telecomtv/open-cast-mine... Here's a uranium mine (used for nuclear energy): https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/82/Openpit.jpg https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/82/Openpit.jpg Compared to these, the habitat displacement from hydro seems very mild. There simply is no energy source that is harmless.
- google234123 4y ago
  For uranium, there is 510 million square km of surface area on earth, what's the issue with "destroying" (a lot of the mines are in pretty uninhabitable places) a few sq km out of 510 million to power the human race?
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Your second picture is a coal mine. Most lithium is produced via evaporative pools. Same process as salt.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    Thanks -- I thought it was Sonora Lithium Mine in Mexico, but it's actually Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia. It primarily mines copper and gold, not lithium (or coal). However, they both look very similar, being open-pit mines.
kimburgess 4y ago
The good news is, that's starting to happen (in some places). A 5GW and 2GW pumped hydro station - both state owned infrastructure - have just been announced for the area I grew up: https://qldhydro.com.au https://qldhydro.com.au.
b112 4y ago
Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems False. A river is not a static thing. Nor a lake. Rivers, lakes, swamps, bodies of water change over thousands, and even hundreds of years. A lake today, is a river tomorrow, and vice versa. Terrain erodes, shifts, rivers dry up, or appear from nothing. Go back in time, in 10k increments, and see how a local area changes. To claim that a hydroelectric dam is massively damaging, is not valid, not even remotely. A dam does not destroy ecosystems, it changes them. One disappears, another appears. And considering that some beaver dams can be seen from space, and dwarf the size of our dams, the idea that daming a river, is unnatural, is absurd! This ridiculous mantra that dams are bad, needs to end. It needs to end, now. If we embraced dams, we could entirely wean off of hydrocarbons, and move to h2 generation, using existing pipelines in North America. And no, the absurd assertion that h2 is hard to store and use, is not valid either. I swear, there is so little logic to the environmental movement. Everything is bad, everything terrible, and so we are left with te worst outcome possible.
- agalunar 4y ago
  I assume that the problem, like global anthropogenic climate change, isn't change in and of itself, it's change faster than biological systems can adapt to or evolve for – resulting in mass extinction events or radical losses of biodiversity.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I strongly disagree. When humans alter the natural environment, it’s inherently destructive. Even if a new environment arises in its place, we have destroyed what was there before. That said, the environmental destruction is worth it when it comes to hydroelectric power.
  - kleiba 4y ago
    I think the comment above argues that every change that happens in nature is a destruction of what was there before, and that that's an inherently natural process, whether humans are responsible or not.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
c7b 4y ago
> Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. Can you elaborate? To me it always seemed like we're basically replacing a river with a lake, which doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it requires adjustment to a new equilibrium, but why is the dam lake ecosystem strictly worse than the river one? Genuinely curious, it always seemed to me that the discussion around hydropower seemed to focus solely on what is lost from the river ecosystem, without discussing what might be gained by a lake ecosystem.
- buttercraft 4y ago
  For example, salmon migrate from the ocean to their spawning grounds in river beds. They have to go up over dams on special fish ladders. Most don't make it. Sockeye salmon were almost completely wiped out but are starting to bounce back. This also affects other species like bears which depend on these salmon runs before hibernation.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  changing the flow characteristics of a river is a massively disruptive event, not just for the species in the water but also the animals that rely on tertiary characteristics and effects of that river. It changes the erosion patterns and sediment carrying capacity of the stream, it changes the seasonal flows that ecosystems have come to rely on, it changes nutrient transport, changes water temperature, changes oxygen content, and a million other things that make the stream less compatible with certain species and more compatible for others. Best case this results in loss of biodiversity, worst case it results in spread of invasive species that have even further impacts on an even wider swatch of the ecosystem. It doesn't make the ecosystem go away, it just changes it to a less settled one - generally when that happens the complexity of the ecosystem goes down until natural selection can catch back up and everything adapts to fill the same niches again, which is not a fast process. It's hugely disruptive to ecosystems.
exabrial 4y ago
I think the main reason is that not everybody has the geography conducive for pumped Hydro. Here in Kansas we have a ton of wind energy production and we’re lucky enough to have a nuclear reactor as well. It’d really be nice to store that, but we have no mountains. We have a rolling plain in the middle of the state but even the highest/lowest delta is like 200-300 ft (I made that number up).
- 01100011 4y ago
  Can you create an underground reservoir, say from an expired oil field, that is of sufficient capacity to create a pumped hydro system in concert with a ground-level reservoir?
  - exabrial 4y ago
    We do have a ton of salt caverns actually, many centrally located (Hutchison, Ks if you’re interested. Great air and space museum there too oddly enough)
    - crote 4y ago
      Unfortunately, water has the nasty habit of dissolving salt. As the Lake Peigneur Disaster taught us, mixing the two is generally a really bad idea.
      - exabrial 4y ago
        That's how they create the salt caverns in fact: they pump hot water below impermeable limestone formations that were created when Kansas was an ocean 290 million years ago during the the Permian period. They use seismographs to watch the cavern formation and steerable drill bits to shape the formation.
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    Still need a place to keep all the water after you pump it out of the cave.
01100011 4y ago
Is there a reason why you wouldn't combine pumped hydro with a diverted fraction of a natural river? You get the ability to store electricity along with some pure generation capacity while still allowing the river to mostly flow unimpeded. You're already building the generation capacity, and this allows you to generate some electricity 24/7 if the need arises. It seems feasible to divert a fraction of a river's flow, provided you work with natural, seasonally fluctuating flow rates, and not severely disturb wildlife. i.e. distribute the diversion plumbing over a mile of the river course.
civilized 4y ago
Why is hydroelectricity massively damaging while hydro pumped storage is great?
- pencilguin 4y ago
  One destroys an ecosystem and fishery. The other moves water between ponds.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Never understood that to be honest.. we can today build quite excellent tunnels that are crossable for fishes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_B5bZvCdJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_B5bZvCdJY Just make it go to almost the same depth and you dont even loose water..
    - pencilguin 4y ago
      A dam is not the same as an aquarium. True experience is that dams destroy fisheries and drive extinctions. Almost always, the fishery had produced overwhelmingly more value than the dam. Grand Coulee Dam should be demolished, but won't be.
pixodaros 4y ago
Its also that most of the best sites for hydropower have already been heavily developed. Countries like Egypt, Canada, and Norway have massive amounts of hydro because it was obviously a good deal since the late 19th century. In western Canada, there is a big debate about the Site C dam site which is not just destructive but based on unstable rock.
lvxferre 4y ago
It gets worse once we remember that electricity can be transported, but the damage stays mostly in place.
jeffparsons 4y ago
Here in Australia we apparently have a virtually limitless supply of sites that are very well suited to "off-river pumped hydro", and yet there doesn't seem to be any action on this front. I find this extra surprising because we also desperately need better fresh water management for other reasons, not least of which being our country's tendency to alternate between drought and flood. There must be some reason we're not doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It seems to tick a lot of boxes: - Powered by intermittent renewables, and can even be collocated - Helps with fresh water management - Easily to parallelize construction - Can be operated in a federated way and replaced/upgraded/maintained piecemeal - Requires only technology that is already extremely well-understood - Relatively cheap - Relatively clean - Quick and easy to turn on/off
- pencilguin 4y ago
  There is no "action" because it would be actively stupid to build storage you have not spare renewable generation capacity to charge up. The money is, instead, correctly spent on generation capacity that actually displaces CO2 output. Storage will be built out later. It is not yet clear which kinds of storage are cheapest, because the costs of many are still falling fast. By the time we have a use for storage, it will be cheaper and we will know which to build.
- sien 4y ago
  Australia is constructing the Snowy River 2 pumped hydro setup. Initial cost estimate was $AU 3 Bn, it's now headed toward $AU 6 Bn plus a connector that could also cost billions. https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-hit-by-another-blow-out-in-costs-and-consumers-will-foot-the-bill/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-hit-by-another-blow-ou...
- sbm_au 4y ago
  I really don't think we have a "virtually limitless supply of sites" here in Australia - in fact I would suggest the opposite. It's a really flat continent. I'm more familiar with the southeast, so I can't speak for Queensland, but areas that have both good rainfall and high topological relief, already have a lot of damn construction (and associated destruction of wilderness). There's the Snowy Mountains scheme of course (which has drained dry the Snowy River of Banjo Patterson's day) and also the lesser known Shoalhaven Scheme, and in Tasmania practically every river except the Franklin is dammed.
baxtr 4y ago
Is that the case for all Hydro? Or only for specific types of Hydro applications? I am curious to understand the different technologies. I am also asking because in the end every kind of power generation will have some effect on the ecosystems. It's always a question of trade-offs.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  River ecosystems are really complex and far-reaching. It's about more than just fish swimming upstream to spawn. Hydroelectric dams destroy these ecosystems completely. Yes, you can build bypass channels for fish, but that's just a part of the system and the channels don't work properly in many cases.
blippage 4y ago
> Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. The whole of the human race is massively damaging to ecosystems. That bit isn't in doubt. The question is as to whether the benefits outweigh the costs. And naturally, humans get to be judge and jury on the matter. But hey, do you want to be able to get to work, afford that iPhone, or not?
- dmos62 4y ago
  What are you saying? Are you asking if the benefits of the human race outweigh the costs? Or of hydroelectricity? If it's the latter, I think OP clearly said that in his opinion hydro is a "no-brainer" in a minority of cases.
  - blippage 4y ago
    My view is that hydro and fission are proven tech, so I am in favour of them. I am sceptical about solar and especially wind, which I suspect are feelgood solutions that are easy sells politically, ignore economics, and may consequently be more harmful than the things they were intended to replace. Having gotten that out of the way, my post was more intended to be along the lines of a curmudgeonly cynical sideswipe at political processes. Getting hydro schemes approved seems a lot like getting bypass routes approved. There's always going to be otters, pandas, or whatever going to be on the short end of the stick. In one interview of a route's detractors, I saw a Downs Syndrome girl shown on the telly. The route would go near the home where she was housed, and would consequently "get confused". I was sitting there, thinking to myself, "holy shit, talk about cynical manipulation. She doesn't even know she's on here." So my post was more of a criticism against the detractors of such schemes, who I think favour emotional over a more sober analysis. It's too easy to sloganeer about "Won't someone pleeease think of the children". In the end, there's no definitively right or wrong answer, of course. It's up to society to weight the benefits and costs. There's always trade-offs. Sometimes the trade-offs can be black-and-white, sometimes they are shades of grey.
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
I think the reason is, pumped hydro competes with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism, and it's very hard to compete with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism on economic terms. In terms of clean tech, it's probably still the best in pure economics, but batteries are currently getting more attention because Tesla found that by bundling its batteries with wheels and motors it can sell them as luxury goods. That circumvented the need to store energy cheaper than fossil fuels, but it's obviously hard to do anything similar with pumped hydro storage.
pyrale 4y ago
My hypothesis is that market-driven electricity production simply doesn't handle this correctly. Planification would probably work better, but that's not politically accepted.
- liketochill 4y ago
  The lead times are too long on power plants. It takes years of permitting and studies and then years of procurement and construction for large projects.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology. This really cannot be enphasised enough - this is the only game in town. The solutions are needed yesterday, and must be built on a massive scale - there is no time for a 20 year R&D to production cycle of a miracle technology. Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining. The only other container that is even worth mentioning is conpressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment

throwaway894345 4y ago
> Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining. Why is mining a major obstacle, provided it is economical and the environmental costs are some orders of magnitude less than those of climate change?
- comte7092 4y ago
  The environmental costs of mining are extremely localized and that’s also generally where the permitting takes place.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  New mining permits in the US are magnets for environmental review lawsuits. Depending on the type of mine, getting a new one up and running can take 7-17 years, counting planning, permitting and the inevitable lawsuits. Copper and nickel mine runoff can be extremely toxic, especially to aquatic wildlife and wetlands. Remediation isn't really feasible once the damage is done, so plenty of groups would rather outright ban certain rich deposits from being mined at all than take the risk. How sensitive environments elsewhere in the world fare under mines that aren't subject to safety precautions in the US is apparently an "other people" problem.
- sydd 4y ago
  Because lots of mined metals come either from 3rd world countries like Congo with no environmental protection laws or are mined in few places like Russia where a trade war can lead to shortages. Hydro requires the most common mayerials like steel or concrete.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    And, not even concrete. But there are numerous other storage alternatives that also do not need any special materials. We don't know yet which ones will be cheapest.
retrac 4y ago
Ontario recently started a pumped hydro facility in an abandoned mine, and it will hold ~400 MWh of power that can be charged or released over several days. Several other sites are in planning, including one that, if it goes forward, will hold 8000 MWh. That could run the entire city of Toronto for many hours. Such facilities should allow Ontario to run on a mix of pure nuclear, hydro and wind. Currently about 15% of the electricity supply in the province is natural gas, used at peak times when demand exceeds the constant output of the nuclear/hydro base. At other times, their surplus is sold at a loss. More pumped storage will smooth this out.
philipkglass 4y ago
The only other contender that is even worth mentioning is compressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment. The largest pumped storage station in the US has a storage capacity of 24,000 MWh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... There's an underground hydrogen storage project underway in Delta, Utah with a capacity of 300,000 MWh: https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-project-garners-finalized-504m-doe-loan-guarantee/ https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-proje... It would take 22 Deltas to overtake the world's largest pumped storage plant, a massive Chinese installation with 6.6 terawatt hours of storage capacity: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/04/state-grid-of-china-switches-on-worlds-largest-pumped-hydro-station/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/04/state-grid-of-china-s... Still, potential underground hydrogen capacity is tremendous, amounting to thousands of terawatt hours in Europe alone: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201910.0187/v1 https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201910.0187/v1
- cwkoss 4y ago
  How does the energy in underground hydrogen get utilized? Is the capacity the combustive energy, or only the energy from the gas pressure?
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    It's burned as fuel in a gas turbine to generate electricity. The process is similar to burning natural gas in turbines, but some equipment adjustments have to be made when running on hydrogen. The Delta project is starting with a 30/70 blend of hydrogen and natural gas, gradually stepping up to 100% hydrogen. Siemens currently has turbines that can burn up to 75% hydrogen and is targeting 100% hydrogen by 2030: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/priorities/future-technologies/hydrogen/zehtc.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/priorities/future-t... General Electric has a variety of gas turbines, accepting 50% to 100% hydrogen in the fuel blend: https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele... Mitsubishi claims to offer turbine operation on up to 100% hydrogen: https://solutions.mhi.com/clean-fuels/hydrogen-gas-turbine/ https://solutions.mhi.com/clean-fuels/hydrogen-gas-turbine/
deleted 4y ago
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_hypx 4y ago
The recent appearance of hydrogen energy storage has basically refuted this argument. We can now store all of the renewable energy we want. The only problem is the lack of awareness among environmentalists and engineers.
- speakfreely 4y ago
  My limited understanding was that the electrolysis tech is not yet efficient enough at scale to make this feasible. Do you have links where I could read more about the cutting edge in hydrogen production? This is a very fascinating potential tool for solving the "we don't have enough batteries" problem with renewables.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    The lack of awareness I am talking about also applies to electrolysis. The current state of electrolyzer technology is already good enough to do the job. Future advancements will make this a no-brainer. This is similar to the rise of photovoltaics a decade (which also caught many 'experts' by surprise). Some recent advancements: https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/toshiba-claims-hydrogen-breakthrough-with-new-p2g-production-technology https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/toshiba-claims-hy... https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electrolysis/ https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr... https://energynews.biz/idaho-national-lab-and-bloom-energy-produce-hydrogen-at-record-rates/ https://energynews.biz/idaho-national-lab-and-bloom-energy-p...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The problem with electrolysis was not its efficiency, the problem was capital cost of the electrolysers (so they could be paired effectively with intermittently overproducing renewables.) Efficiency was more of the concern when it was imagined expensive nuclear power would be driving electrolysers 24/7.
- pydry 4y ago
  Hydrogen leaks like crazy and corrodes storage cannisters. It isnt especially practical.
credit_guy 4y ago
> this is the only game in town. There is another game in town. Emphasis on "is", as in present tense, not future. Natural gas power plants. They emit much, much less CO2 than coal. If we use them to only generate electricity when solar and wind are not enough, we end up with much lower emissions than what the trees remove from the atmosphere. We also end up needing to overbuild solar and wind by only about 30%, not by a factor of 3 or 4. The capital cost of maintaining the current, existing, natural gas power plants is basically zero. The capital cost of building new pumped storage is huge. Here, let me do it for you. Lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 m requires about 10 Joules (more precisely 9.8, as every high school student hopefully knows). One billion kg, or one million tons is 10 giga-joule, or giga-watt-seconds. Increase to 360 million tons, and you get one GigaWatt-hour. One ton is one cubic meter of water, one million is a square of 1km2 area and 1m height, and 360 megatons is a square of horizontal width and length of 6 km and a height of 10 meters. A fairly big lake. Building an artificial one would qualify as a mega-project. It would cost multiple billions of dollars. It would be able to generate one gigawatt of power for one hour. Of course you'd raise it to a certain height, let's say 100 meters, and that would generate the 1GW of power for 4 days. If you have 100% efficiency. Which you don't have, because you lose energy both when you pump up, and when you let the water come down. Assuming an optimistic 25% overall round-trip efficiency, you get 1GW power for one day. If you want for one month, well, you multiply this by 30. Or you can just keep around a 1GW natural gas power plant, and use it when you need it.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  To explain the economics of pumped storage, you must first understand it. Pumped storage round-trip efficiency is not, in fact, 25%, but routinely above 70%. Nobody pumps water up just 10 meters. It is, instead, pumped (say) a thousand meters up to a reservoir commonly 10 meters deep. A 10m-deep reservoir needs only a cheap earthen dike. A dike is hardly a "megaproject", even if km long. Dikes are low tech. The energy is extracted at the bottom end of a penstock. Each ton of water in a reservoir 1000m up stores 10MJ. One just 100x100x10 meters thus holds 100,000 tons, 1000 GJ, >270 MWh, 6 hours at ~40 MW. Nobody needs 30 days' storage. If your hydro storage runs low, and local fuel tankage looks like it might, too, you order out for LNG or, soon, NH3 or LH2 from solar farms in the tropics. Few would need or want a 1km x 1km reservoir. Smaller ones distributed where the power is needed are more useful. An underground cavity, where it exists, can be used instead of a hilltop reservoir, or with one. Burning NG once in a while is no big deal, but NH3 will be cheaper in the near future.

theptip 4y ago

Since you’re in the industry I’m interested in your perspective on this report from Lawrence Berkeley lab on integrated battery storage for wind/solar projects: https://emp.lbl.gov/hybrid https://emp.lbl.gov/hybrid It seems to me that high capacity integrated battery projects are being built in large numbers, and they are much closer to cost-competitive than I would have though from the general sentiment in the press/HN comments. Obviously they are more expensive than raw solar but still in a price range to be competitive with NatGas OpEx in the next few decades. If that’s true then we might not need to fight the environmental battles on pumped storage (which for the record I do agree could be used more).

idiotsecant 4y ago
Too little, too late unfortunately. The amount of storage available from these projects is tiny and even though it's accelerating it's not accelerating at nearly the level required for the physics of a primary renewable grid to work. Chemical storage of energy is expensive and requires a long supply chain. It's huge that the costs are trending in a favorable direction and maybe eventually we can do all our load balancing that way but we don't need results 15 years from now, we need them yesterday.
- theptip 4y ago
  Is this supported by the report though? We have yet to build most of the solar we need, and IIUC almost half of new solar is now being built with storage: > At the close of 2021, there were more than 670 GW of solar plants in the nation’s queues; 285 GW (~42%) of this capacity was proposed as a hybrid, most typically pairing PV with battery storage (PV+storage represented nearly 90% of all hybrid capacity in the queues). This is the surprising fact for me from that report. Of course, “built with some storage” is not the same as “built with 100% storage” but the report shows the distribution is not terrible, with ranges of 50-100% storage being built. (With %age being something like “daily maximum variance from demand curve” but I don’t understand exactly how this is computed).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

plorg 4y ago

When I was in school for power systems planning the the accepted notion was that pumped hydro storage is cool and great, but like hydropower, it is extremely geographically dependent, and we have basically developed all of the places where it would work (at least in the US), or at least, by order of magnitude, there are not enough remaining untapped hydro-related resources to make a dent in projected storage demand. Is that a wrong understanding?

pfdietz 4y ago
It's geographically dependent if built on rivers. Beyond rivers the possibilities expand enormously.
idiotsecant 4y ago
Entirely wrong. All pumped storage requires is a big high spot and a big low spot*. Take a look at this, for example: https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/ https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/ There are a lot of good pumped storage sites out there. *exaggeration, but close enough.
- greedo 4y ago
  Unfortunately that rules out a lot of the US Midwest, where coal is a huge source of electricity generation.
  - Animats 4y ago
    That's the US wind belt - the Texas panhandle north to Canada, and east into Illinois.[1] [1] https://www.kgou.org/energy/2013-09-03/oklahomas-wind-energy-transmission-gap-in-two-images https://www.kgou.org/energy/2013-09-03/oklahomas-wind-energy...
- rocmcd 4y ago
  > All pumped storage requires is a big high spot and a big low spot I think that's what the GP meant by "extremely geographically dependent." Finding a 1,000 ft height difference (using the Gordon Butte Project as an example) between reservoirs will be really challenging in huge swaths of the United States and elsewhere.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

We certainly can use solar, wind & batteries to eliminate fossil fuels from our electricity system. Estimates are that we'd need about 300TWh of batteries, which is on the edge of feasible. Pumped storage would be a lot cheaper, though.

idiotsecant 4y ago
Oh great, only 300TWH of batteries! Let's put in the P.O.! Who is supplying those, again?
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  300TWh of batteries per decade is a lot easier than 90 million barrels of oil per day yet somehow we manage to do the latter.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    At current battery prices of $132/kwh and oil at $88/barrel, 300 TWh of batteries per decade is actually 40% more expensive than 90 million barrels of oil per day.
    - megaman821 4y ago
      Damn, we are that close. We are using expensive, high-density batteries meant for electronics and transportation for stationary storage. CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year. In five years there will be even more grid-targeting battery solutions on the market at low price points.
      - scythe 4y ago
        From a practical business perspective, the falling prices of batteries may not be ideal from an investor's perspective. If I buy $100M of batteries and the price drops 50% in five years, I just "lost" 50 million dollars. You'd have to be at a point where the proceeds to storage exceed the depreciation of the product in order to pencil out, I think. So a lot of storage that could be built probably won't be built until the technology war shakes out. >CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year. Tried to look this up, but didn't find anything. Where's that?

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Wind and solar energy also destroy ecosystems, but we don't stop using them. Dams may be more harmful, though.

cinntaile 4y ago
What's your definition of destroy and do you have any examples of ecosystems that were destroyed by wind and solar?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Cutting down large swathes of forest and building over the habitats of endangered species happen for both. Solar and wind farms both need large land clearances in areas that have a lot of their respective kind of energy, which animals also use. Solar farms do best in deserts, which tend to be habitats for species that like extreme conditions. Several of them have been blocked in recent years. There was a recent huge solar project that was planned to cover most of the land area that an endangered desert tortoise inhabits. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar/exclusive-sierra-club-sues-over-california-solar-plant-idUSTRE70432N20110105 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar/exclusive-sierra-cl... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/massive-desert-solar-project-experiment-in-tortoise-survival https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/massive... Aside from the large swathes of forest that have to be cut down for wind farms, birds of prey tend to fly into the blades of wind turbines. These are also often endangered species. The fish and wildlife survey estimates 140,000-500,000 bird deaths at wind farms per year, with most of these being birds of prey which have low birth rates and high conservation value (many endangered species). In contrast, cats kill billions of birds per year, but they are common small birds, not endangered predator species. In addition, something like 800,000 bats are killed by wind turbines. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb.260 https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb... The solution, for solar, is obviously installations on top of human structures, like roofs and roads (but not on the road surface, which is silly). For wind, there isn't a good solution that doesn't hurt predator bird populations.
  - 4y ago

99_00 4y ago

Why doesn't hydroelectric pumped storage have the same obvious and massive ecosystem damage as hydroelectric when it is hydro electric + the environmental damage caused by producing solar panels or wind turbines?

animal_spirits 4y ago
The difference is because hydroelectric generation depends on currently existing rivers, damming them and turning them into electricity sources has to change the natural ecosystem in the river. For pumped storage, we can essentially build it anywhere there is an elevation change. So we can avoid harming river ecosystems where they naturally exist and create pipes and tanks where it would be the least damaging to the ecosystem
laverya 4y ago
Pumped Hydro doesn't have to be built on a river - you just need a pair of reservoirs that you can fill and transfer water between. This obviously destroys the ecosystem of the valley you use, but at least you're not impacting river water temperatures/sedimentation/fish spawning/etc.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  It does not, in fact, need to destroy any ecosystem.
  - laverya 4y ago
    No matter where you put the few cubic kilometers of water that pumped hydro requires, you need to put it somewhere. The ecosystem of that place will then be displaced or destroyed.
    - pencilguin 4y ago
      It does not need more than the tiniest fraction of a cubic km of water. A reservoir can increase scarce habitat for migratory birds, which is commonly much more valuable than your typical bald hilltop.

rr808 4y ago

Agreed we need hydroelectric pumped storage - what is a typical efficiency number for that? I'd think its super inefficient, but not sure what the numbers should be.

karamanolev 4y ago
> The round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies between 70%–80%, with some sources claiming up to 87%. For me, that sounds like quite good, given the capacity possibilities. We can always build tiered storage, with smaller, but more efficient tiers (e.g. batteries) used first and PSH when that's filled up or exhausted.
- rr808 4y ago
  Wow I actually was expecting more like 10-20%.
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    Turbines and pumps can be surprisingly elegant and efficient when built well.

api 4y ago

I've wondered for a while if we couldn't build a pipeline between the ocean and the Salton Sea in SoCal and store quite a bit of energy that way. The Salton Sea is already kind of a wasteland so at least use it for something.

jhoechtl 4y ago
What is the difference in meters? If not much, the effort of building will not be counterweighted by the energy storage capacity. AFAIK salton sea is pretty much at sea level?
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  It's 72 meters below, but it's not very big, and once it's full you'll have to wait for the water to evaporate away, I assume? If it could be made a permanent bay of the ocean, that might make the area less of a disaster. But it seems real hard...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 4y ago
    If it's below then the answer is no, so that answers my question. :) I was assuming it would be above sea level since it's inland.
    - jhoechtl 4y ago
      Actually all.you need is a height difference, the direction doesn't matter. 72 meters is the limiting factor here.

throwaway894345 4y ago

My impression as a layperson is that the economic feasibility of pumped hydro is very location-dependent, and our electrical grid isn't so fungible that storage in one region can meaningfully store energy generated in another region. Is my understanding correct? And if so, how do we tackle that?

7952 4y ago
Pumped hydro is very dependent on location. But the supply of energy would not need to be. Electricity grids and DC interconnectors work really well. Having a few massive sites spread across a continent could work well.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Pumped hydro is not, in fact, very dependent on location. You just need a hill. There are a lot of hills. Even places without hills often have deep underground cavities, which also serve.

jhoechtl 4y ago

Forgive me my lack of understanding of the englisch language, but I do not understand the distinction you make. Hydroelectricity: Is this power you obtain by placing turbines behind a huge concrete wall of a large river? If so, how is the scenario of building a large concrete dam in the mountains where water is pumped up a hill to covert it into kinetic energy any more better? I understand that hydroelectricity is used to supply the basic power need, say 80% and a water reservoir with turbines to cover power peak needs.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Because you're not disrupting a river's flow and natural ecosystem, you only utilize the watershed some more during the initial filling period. After that, it's a closed system separate from the river ecosystem where only evaporation causes leakage.
- roamerz 4y ago
  That ship has already sailed as most power producing dams have been around for long time. Removing them would destroy the (now natural) ecosystem they have created. Plus dams have way more benefits to us than the extremely clean energy they produce - not just store.
  - brookst 4y ago
    This is the first time I've seen a claim that dams create ecosystems that we should worry about destroying. As far as I know, they disrupt fish and animal migrations, reduce natural carbon sinks, reduce biodiversity, and block sediment from providing nutrients downstream. Is there any source saying dams create healthy natural ecosystems? A necessary evil I can kind of see, but a net positive for ecosystems? That seems doubtful.
    - whiddershins 4y ago
      I don’t know. I suspect the bias is towards the pre-dam ecosystem so it might be challenging to rationally compare them. Certainly an ecosystem will grow up around nearly any situation.

marcosdumay 4y ago

> why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage Because energy storage is currently not a problem, and consequently not profitable. Unless you have some very bold organization to invest on things that today make negative marginal profit on any scale, or a government rushing into the solution of tomorrow's problem with today's money, you won't see any action. It will certainly turn into a problem at some point (I expect it on this decade already). But even when it happens, it's not clear what kind of storage will be successful; and pumped hydro has a bunch of competitive issues due to its geographic limitations.

jraph 4y ago
> Because energy storage is currently not a problem Yes it is. It's one part of the solution to fluctuations in electricity production (renewables: wind, solar) and consumption (day / night, warm / cold). In a grid, at all time, the production has to match the consumption perfectly. You can make the frequency vary a bit to make up for fluctuations, but only so much before damaging things. Storage helps with a production higher than consumption and then with a higher consumption later. Good storage makes grids more flexible and ideally lower the need for electricity production, and costs. I agree with the rest of your comment though.
- danans 4y ago
  > Yes it is. It's one part of the solution to fluctuations in electricity production (renewables: wind, solar) and consumption (day / night, warm / cold). It both is and isn't a problem, depending on your time scale, and opinions about how we should bridge the variations in supply and demand. Today, on the short timescale (subsecond) this need is called frequency regulation, and we mostly do that with so-called "peaker plants", essentially natural gas turbines that run constantly and feed power onto the grid at subsecond notice. This is a very expensive source of supply (easily 5x the median wholesale rates) because the natural gas is mostly wasted (not to mention the very high CO2 emissions: ~600g/kWh produced [1]). Therefore, there are a lot of companies working toward solutions to this, that don't involve burning fuel, either by building stationary storage, or by aggregating negative demand, thereby participating in a very expensive electricity market with a low-marginal cost solution. In short, this is where the money is today. The next level for storage is not yet a problem, but will be: storing excess renewable energy supply between different parts of the day or week. The value of this service to the climate is massive, but the economic value of this is not enough to justify the cost of Lithium batteries. To support this use case, we need batteries or other storage media that are 10-100x less expensive than Lithium batteries. There are many candidate storage technologies for this use case, from pumped hydro to metal-air batteries, to compressed air energy storage, but no clear winners yet. 1. Estimated based on a rough average of .65tons/MWh for CA peaker plants from: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/California.pdf https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/...

jmclnx 4y ago

In my region of the US, hydro use to power a lot of manufacturing until electricity came in. Canals were built for power, leaving the rivers flow naturally. But these canals are in dis-repair. To me, why not refurb these canals to provide power. There is plenty of water and plenty of places like this in the area.

agumonkey 4y ago

what about artificial hydro ? make a big large raised water retention thing with generators.. it will take space but not harm existing natural spaces. Even in europe there's a lot of unused land.

zizee 4y ago
Pumped hydro needs to be truely massive scale, both in the amount of water (read: lots of depth AND surface area), and the height differential between the two reservoirs. To make it cost feasible we really need very favourable natural geography. Building such structures ourselves would be astronomically expensive.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Pumped hydro does not, in fact, need "lots of depth". 10m is typical, for which cheap earthen dikes suffice. It does not, in fact, need "very favourable natural geography". It needs an elevation difference, something found almost everywhere, Holland and Kansas excepted. Kansas has deep underground cavities, which also suffice. Building dikes is cheap and low tech. Dikes predate written language.
  - zizee 4y ago
    On the depth thing, I really only meant to mean you need lots and lots of water. You could have a shallow basis, and take over a huge area of land, or or smaller amount of land if you have deeper water. Deeper also allows for less evaporation, less land area. Perhaps your and my definitions of favourable geography are different. You need a water source, due to evaporation, you need a big resovoir at elevation, and another lower. If you don't want to build it all yourself you need valleys that you can close off at one end. You need ground that is not permeable, so the water you have stays where you want it. Perhaps I am misreading you, but you seem a bit agitated with your in fact writing style. We're all friends here. I am not anti pumped storage. Far from it. If you can make it work economically, it's a great solution. It will definitely be part of the mix. But there's reasons it's not being rolled out everywhere, and a lot of this is due to cost and unfavorable geography.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

Totally agree on pumped power storage capacity being needed. But those are massive infrastructure projects. Erecting a damn, to store the potential energy is bound to meet resistance. Alternative solution: Build Lots of pressure-piston, that are stable standing on its own. Basically, a pillar of ice, coated in insulation, standing upon a small lake that provides water at pressure. If additional energy is needed after the extraction, heat is added to the system and the lake replenishes, while the piston shrinks. If energy needs to be stored, additional water is pumped on top and frozen. If additional heat reservoirs are nearby or something in need of coolant is nearby, additional heatpump like bonuses should be findable. Similar concepts have been explored: https://energypost.eu/gravity-batteries-any-nation-can-do-it-at-scale-using-rocks/ https://energypost.eu/gravity-batteries-any-nation-can-do-it... but they need massive construction efforts. Instead of having the building up storage provide its own structure, with little more then a concrete base and some grain silo walls. https://i.imgur.com/iCg9LzY.png https://i.imgur.com/iCg9LzY.png The piston sealing the under pressure water, could be archieved via "onion" layers, steps leading down, taking up a part of the pressure, until it drops to "holding back by atmosphere" on the outmost layer.

pencilguin 4y ago
Pumped-hydro need not, in fact be any sort of "massive infrastructure project".

nostromo 4y ago

> hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems Sure, but compare it with the alternatives. Oil and gas are obviously very destructive of ecosystems. But so are lots of renewables. Here's what a silicon mine looks like (used to make solar panels): https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/anglogold-ashanti-digs-itself-out-of-debt.jpg https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/anglogold-... Here's a lithium mine (used to make batteries): https://assets.telecomtv.com/assets/telecomtv/open-cast-mine-11646.jpg https://assets.telecomtv.com/assets/telecomtv/open-cast-mine... Here's a uranium mine (used for nuclear energy): https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/82/Openpit.jpg https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/82/Openpit.jpg Compared to these, the habitat displacement from hydro seems very mild. There simply is no energy source that is harmless.

google234123 4y ago
For uranium, there is 510 million square km of surface area on earth, what's the issue with "destroying" (a lot of the mines are in pretty uninhabitable places) a few sq km out of 510 million to power the human race?
throwayyy479087 4y ago
Your second picture is a coal mine. Most lithium is produced via evaporative pools. Same process as salt.
- nostromo 4y ago
  Thanks -- I thought it was Sonora Lithium Mine in Mexico, but it's actually Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia. It primarily mines copper and gold, not lithium (or coal). However, they both look very similar, being open-pit mines.

kimburgess 4y ago

The good news is, that's starting to happen (in some places). A 5GW and 2GW pumped hydro station - both state owned infrastructure - have just been announced for the area I grew up: https://qldhydro.com.au https://qldhydro.com.au.

b112 4y ago

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems False. A river is not a static thing. Nor a lake. Rivers, lakes, swamps, bodies of water change over thousands, and even hundreds of years. A lake today, is a river tomorrow, and vice versa. Terrain erodes, shifts, rivers dry up, or appear from nothing. Go back in time, in 10k increments, and see how a local area changes. To claim that a hydroelectric dam is massively damaging, is not valid, not even remotely. A dam does not destroy ecosystems, it changes them. One disappears, another appears. And considering that some beaver dams can be seen from space, and dwarf the size of our dams, the idea that daming a river, is unnatural, is absurd! This ridiculous mantra that dams are bad, needs to end. It needs to end, now. If we embraced dams, we could entirely wean off of hydrocarbons, and move to h2 generation, using existing pipelines in North America. And no, the absurd assertion that h2 is hard to store and use, is not valid either. I swear, there is so little logic to the environmental movement. Everything is bad, everything terrible, and so we are left with te worst outcome possible.

agalunar 4y ago
I assume that the problem, like global anthropogenic climate change, isn't change in and of itself, it's change faster than biological systems can adapt to or evolve for – resulting in mass extinction events or radical losses of biodiversity.
D13Fd 4y ago
I strongly disagree. When humans alter the natural environment, it’s inherently destructive. Even if a new environment arises in its place, we have destroyed what was there before. That said, the environmental destruction is worth it when it comes to hydroelectric power.
- kleiba 4y ago
  I think the comment above argues that every change that happens in nature is a destruction of what was there before, and that that's an inherently natural process, whether humans are responsible or not.
idiotsecant 4y ago

c7b 4y ago

> Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. Can you elaborate? To me it always seemed like we're basically replacing a river with a lake, which doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it requires adjustment to a new equilibrium, but why is the dam lake ecosystem strictly worse than the river one? Genuinely curious, it always seemed to me that the discussion around hydropower seemed to focus solely on what is lost from the river ecosystem, without discussing what might be gained by a lake ecosystem.

buttercraft 4y ago
For example, salmon migrate from the ocean to their spawning grounds in river beds. They have to go up over dams on special fish ladders. Most don't make it. Sockeye salmon were almost completely wiped out but are starting to bounce back. This also affects other species like bears which depend on these salmon runs before hibernation.
idiotsecant 4y ago
changing the flow characteristics of a river is a massively disruptive event, not just for the species in the water but also the animals that rely on tertiary characteristics and effects of that river. It changes the erosion patterns and sediment carrying capacity of the stream, it changes the seasonal flows that ecosystems have come to rely on, it changes nutrient transport, changes water temperature, changes oxygen content, and a million other things that make the stream less compatible with certain species and more compatible for others. Best case this results in loss of biodiversity, worst case it results in spread of invasive species that have even further impacts on an even wider swatch of the ecosystem. It doesn't make the ecosystem go away, it just changes it to a less settled one - generally when that happens the complexity of the ecosystem goes down until natural selection can catch back up and everything adapts to fill the same niches again, which is not a fast process. It's hugely disruptive to ecosystems.

exabrial 4y ago

I think the main reason is that not everybody has the geography conducive for pumped Hydro. Here in Kansas we have a ton of wind energy production and we’re lucky enough to have a nuclear reactor as well. It’d really be nice to store that, but we have no mountains. We have a rolling plain in the middle of the state but even the highest/lowest delta is like 200-300 ft (I made that number up).

01100011 4y ago
Can you create an underground reservoir, say from an expired oil field, that is of sufficient capacity to create a pumped hydro system in concert with a ground-level reservoir?
- exabrial 4y ago
  We do have a ton of salt caverns actually, many centrally located (Hutchison, Ks if you’re interested. Great air and space museum there too oddly enough)
  - crote 4y ago
    Unfortunately, water has the nasty habit of dissolving salt. As the Lake Peigneur Disaster taught us, mixing the two is generally a really bad idea.
    - exabrial 4y ago
      That's how they create the salt caverns in fact: they pump hot water below impermeable limestone formations that were created when Kansas was an ocean 290 million years ago during the the Permian period. They use seismographs to watch the cavern formation and steerable drill bits to shape the formation.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Still need a place to keep all the water after you pump it out of the cave.

01100011 4y ago

Is there a reason why you wouldn't combine pumped hydro with a diverted fraction of a natural river? You get the ability to store electricity along with some pure generation capacity while still allowing the river to mostly flow unimpeded. You're already building the generation capacity, and this allows you to generate some electricity 24/7 if the need arises. It seems feasible to divert a fraction of a river's flow, provided you work with natural, seasonally fluctuating flow rates, and not severely disturb wildlife. i.e. distribute the diversion plumbing over a mile of the river course.

civilized 4y ago

Why is hydroelectricity massively damaging while hydro pumped storage is great?

pencilguin 4y ago
One destroys an ecosystem and fishery. The other moves water between ponds.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Never understood that to be honest.. we can today build quite excellent tunnels that are crossable for fishes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_B5bZvCdJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_B5bZvCdJY Just make it go to almost the same depth and you dont even loose water..
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    A dam is not the same as an aquarium. True experience is that dams destroy fisheries and drive extinctions. Almost always, the fishery had produced overwhelmingly more value than the dam. Grand Coulee Dam should be demolished, but won't be.

pixodaros 4y ago

Its also that most of the best sites for hydropower have already been heavily developed. Countries like Egypt, Canada, and Norway have massive amounts of hydro because it was obviously a good deal since the late 19th century. In western Canada, there is a big debate about the Site C dam site which is not just destructive but based on unstable rock.

lvxferre 4y ago

It gets worse once we remember that electricity can be transported, but the damage stays mostly in place.

jeffparsons 4y ago

Here in Australia we apparently have a virtually limitless supply of sites that are very well suited to "off-river pumped hydro", and yet there doesn't seem to be any action on this front. I find this extra surprising because we also desperately need better fresh water management for other reasons, not least of which being our country's tendency to alternate between drought and flood. There must be some reason we're not doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It seems to tick a lot of boxes: - Powered by intermittent renewables, and can even be collocated - Helps with fresh water management - Easily to parallelize construction - Can be operated in a federated way and replaced/upgraded/maintained piecemeal - Requires only technology that is already extremely well-understood - Relatively cheap - Relatively clean - Quick and easy to turn on/off

pencilguin 4y ago
There is no "action" because it would be actively stupid to build storage you have not spare renewable generation capacity to charge up. The money is, instead, correctly spent on generation capacity that actually displaces CO2 output. Storage will be built out later. It is not yet clear which kinds of storage are cheapest, because the costs of many are still falling fast. By the time we have a use for storage, it will be cheaper and we will know which to build.
sien 4y ago
Australia is constructing the Snowy River 2 pumped hydro setup. Initial cost estimate was $AU 3 Bn, it's now headed toward $AU 6 Bn plus a connector that could also cost billions. https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-hit-by-another-blow-out-in-costs-and-consumers-will-foot-the-bill/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-hit-by-another-blow-ou...
sbm_au 4y ago
I really don't think we have a "virtually limitless supply of sites" here in Australia - in fact I would suggest the opposite. It's a really flat continent. I'm more familiar with the southeast, so I can't speak for Queensland, but areas that have both good rainfall and high topological relief, already have a lot of damn construction (and associated destruction of wilderness). There's the Snowy Mountains scheme of course (which has drained dry the Snowy River of Banjo Patterson's day) and also the lesser known Shoalhaven Scheme, and in Tasmania practically every river except the Franklin is dammed.

baxtr 4y ago

Is that the case for all Hydro? Or only for specific types of Hydro applications? I am curious to understand the different technologies. I am also asking because in the end every kind of power generation will have some effect on the ecosystems. It's always a question of trade-offs.

theshrike79 4y ago
River ecosystems are really complex and far-reaching. It's about more than just fish swimming upstream to spawn. Hydroelectric dams destroy these ecosystems completely. Yes, you can build bypass channels for fish, but that's just a part of the system and the channels don't work properly in many cases.

blippage 4y ago

> Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. The whole of the human race is massively damaging to ecosystems. That bit isn't in doubt. The question is as to whether the benefits outweigh the costs. And naturally, humans get to be judge and jury on the matter. But hey, do you want to be able to get to work, afford that iPhone, or not?

dmos62 4y ago
What are you saying? Are you asking if the benefits of the human race outweigh the costs? Or of hydroelectricity? If it's the latter, I think OP clearly said that in his opinion hydro is a "no-brainer" in a minority of cases.
- blippage 4y ago
  My view is that hydro and fission are proven tech, so I am in favour of them. I am sceptical about solar and especially wind, which I suspect are feelgood solutions that are easy sells politically, ignore economics, and may consequently be more harmful than the things they were intended to replace. Having gotten that out of the way, my post was more intended to be along the lines of a curmudgeonly cynical sideswipe at political processes. Getting hydro schemes approved seems a lot like getting bypass routes approved. There's always going to be otters, pandas, or whatever going to be on the short end of the stick. In one interview of a route's detractors, I saw a Downs Syndrome girl shown on the telly. The route would go near the home where she was housed, and would consequently "get confused". I was sitting there, thinking to myself, "holy shit, talk about cynical manipulation. She doesn't even know she's on here." So my post was more of a criticism against the detractors of such schemes, who I think favour emotional over a more sober analysis. It's too easy to sloganeer about "Won't someone pleeease think of the children". In the end, there's no definitively right or wrong answer, of course. It's up to society to weight the benefits and costs. There's always trade-offs. Sometimes the trade-offs can be black-and-white, sometimes they are shades of grey.

SuoDuanDao 4y ago

I think the reason is, pumped hydro competes with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism, and it's very hard to compete with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism on economic terms. In terms of clean tech, it's probably still the best in pure economics, but batteries are currently getting more attention because Tesla found that by bundling its batteries with wheels and motors it can sell them as luxury goods. That circumvented the need to store energy cheaper than fossil fuels, but it's obviously hard to do anything similar with pumped hydro storage.

pyrale 4y ago

My hypothesis is that market-driven electricity production simply doesn't handle this correctly. Planification would probably work better, but that's not politically accepted.

liketochill 4y ago
The lead times are too long on power plants. It takes years of permitting and studies and then years of procurement and construction for large projects.