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Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem. Don't bother with wind nor solar nor nuclear nor storage. Just build dams, problem solved.
by Manuel_D 4y ago
Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem. Don't bother with wind nor solar nor nuclear nor storage. Just build dams, problem solved.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNo need to have a tantrum just because you couldn't think of a way to claim every joule needed weeks long chemical battery storage.
- Manuel_D 4y agoWe won't need any storage. We'll just get all of our electricity from dams. Since it's a well understood problem we can build them anywhere we want in any quantity.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNah, wind and solar are cheaper and safer and don't take as long. We can use the existing dams for dispatchable power though. As well as CSP of which the unsubsidized LCOE has recently hit parity with O&M of nuclear and is plummeting. Throw in some thermal storage as well, that's safe.
- Manuel_D 4y agoNope, hydroelectricity is about the same levelized cost of energy. Include storage costs and it's vastly cheaper: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... Look at the countries that produce all or nearly all their electricity from renewables. It's dominated by hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... And since it's a well understood problem we can just build it everywhere, in arbitrary quantities.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoThis is quite the tantrum to be having in response to being told that you don't need a nuclear reactor to pump water downhill. Was it really so earth shattering to your world view?
- Manuel_D 4y agoBut you do need an alpine lake, with another body of water down below it to collect that water so it can be pumped back into the upper reservoir. The geography needed to built pumped storage is very specific. Simply saying that we can just build dozens of terawatt hours of pumped hydro is as nonsensical as saying we can just build more dams. Is that really so earth shattering to your world view?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYou claimed that chemical storage is always necessary to pump municipal fresh water with VRE. I pointed out that this a perfect example of a dispatchable load because it is frequently already done with reservoirs and water towers and you had a tantrum and tried to straw man that as claiming all generation be backed by PHES.
- Manuel_D 4y agoReservoir towers don't hold nearly enough water to be viable energy stores. You need a big alpine lake like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill And you need a reservoir down below to receive the water as it passes through turbines otherwise you're waiting for rainfall to fill that upper reservoir up naturally. The geographic conditions to make pumped hydro are far more constrained than you seem to think. Most water reservoirs for municipal water supplies don't have the elevation drop to be used for generation and they don't have the lower reservoir to capture and feed water back into the upper reservoir.
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- DanBC 4y ago> Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem I feel like we still have some problems with dam building, because they keep failing. We struggle to get the building material (in particular, sand). Concrete is pretty awful in terms of CO2. Dams of all sizes cause problematic changes to the rivers they're on, and block flows of fish and other animals. Smaller low head weirs and dams kill humans. Lots of time, money, and effort is going into removing smaller dams and low head weirs.