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OK 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. M
by moloch-hai 4y ago
OK 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.