6 ms·
This is highly geographically dependent, but water displacement “batteries” that pump water to an elevated basin when power is on and then let it run through tu
by didericis 4y ago
This is highly geographically dependent, but water displacement “batteries” that pump water to an elevated basin when power is on and then let it run through turbines back down to a lowered basin seem like a really simple, effective solution that can work at scale.
- moloch-hai 4y agoOK if by "highly geographically dependent" you mean "not highly geographically dependent". You need a hill, but there are a very, very large number of hills. Most usually you need to build an earthen dike around the top of the hill, although often a natural feature allows it to be shorter. The reservoir does not need to be deep because the "head" is from it to the bottom of the hill, or even to the water table well below that. The reservoir or reservoirs are good places to float solar farms.
- lazide 4y agoKansas and the Netherlands would like a word.
- moloch-hai 4y agoBoth have plenty of transmission lines to places with hills.
- bigfudge 4y agoExactly. And the hills are not actually that far away.
- didericis 4y agoI forget what country was trying to build a bunch of these but an article popped up on here about this a while back and they cited lack of suitable locations as one of the main barriers for building more. The most ideal locations are natural that require minimal land reshaping. Some places in the world have a lot of suitable locations like that. Others don’t. But despite that it still seems much more feasible to build lots of hydro pump stations like that than it does to build other forms of battery farms.
- moloch-hai 4y agoPlaces with not many hills will of course prefer other storage media. Places with lots of hills will also prefer other storage media if they turn out to be cheaper. It is far from clear yet how costs will settle out. It is anyway not time yet to build more than just enough storage to shift the few hours from peak generation to peak use.
- bigfudge 4y agoThere was a paper here recently which showed there were a large order more locations s for this than previously thought.
- robertlagrant 4y agoI don't know what "at scale" means in this context, but they certainly do work [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
- didericis 4y agoBy “at scale” I mean building enough pumped storage facilities to meet current energy demands when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. It seems much more likely that we could build sufficient pumped storage facilities than the kind of battery farms the poster I was replying to rightly points out are not likely to meet required needs for the foreseeable future, if ever.
- lazide 4y agoThat depends on the geography. Bangladesh, The Netherlands, Kansas, maybe Texas, etc? No, not useful. Norway, Wyoming, Idaho, California, Switzerland, Nevada, Arizona, etc.? Oh yeah. Very doable.
- didericis 4y agoYep, I tried to acknowledge that in the original comment when I said it’s geographically dependent. It still seems like the only solution that currently exists and actually works on the scale required. I’m not sure what realistic solutions are for regions where hydro pumped storage is not a viable option.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoA handful of hours storage, 60% curtailment (with most of the surplus used to create hydrogen and such for chemical feedstock) and a small amount of HVDC leaves a remainder small enough that meeting it with biogas and existing hydro is possible, meeting it with hudrogen is not costly, or meeting it with LNG is not a huge problem. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z The world produces about 3TW of electricity, 2022's battery production was 760GWh and it's growing 30-50% yoy. Ideally degrowth happens, but while we negotiate that, the |bhattery industry is at the scale required and is rapidly shedding critical mineral requirements (sodium ion is at GWh scale now, and much larger supply chains with all abundant materials come online in june).
- RhodesianHunter 4y agoIt does not scale. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
- didericis 4y agoGood article. I stand corrected.
- moloch-hai 4y agoIt is not a good article, at all. See above. It is cleverly written to fool the unwary.
- didericis 4y agoI’ll back out then/leave the debate to those who have the time to sort through all of this. The gist about the enormous amount of space needed in that article seemed accurate/more than I thought.
- moloch-hai 4y agoThe article is foolish from top to bottom. It says exactly one right thing: you can put a reservoir on a hilltop, and the "head" is the height of the hill, not the depth of the reservoir. You do not need a mountain. You do not need a high valley. It is cheap to build an earthen dike around the top of a hill, leveling off the hilltop peak for material. The hill does not need to be steep; a shallow slope just means a longer penstock, which costs more. A 300-meter hill is high enough for practical use. In most cases only a few hours' storage is plenty; you only need enough to make firing up a gas generator an occasional event.
- RhodesianHunter 4y agoLuckily the author took every opportunity to err on the side of underestimating the amount of water storage needed, to head off such pedantry that wouldn't significantly change the math.