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Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by bobthepanda on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:55PM (#20423337)
Hydro can be extremely disruptive to ecosystems, and you also need a suitable site for it. It's very situational, from what I understand.
Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by Animats on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:03PM (#20423413)
very situational

Yes. You need a mountain lake and a low level lake close to each other, and the lakes aren't useful for much else because the water level goes way up and down every day. The US has 10 pumped storage plants bigger than a gigawatt, and few attractive sites for more.

Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by organsnyder on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:54PM (#20424405)
Or build a reservoir next to a body of water. The Ludington Pumped Storage Plant next to Lake Michigan has 2172 MW of generating capacity and 19,548 MWh of storage capacity.
Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by Animats on Saturday July 13, 2019 @03:37AM (#20426985)
That site has a hill. 111 meter difference between the reservors. More would be better, but that part of the country doesn't have mountains.
Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by cmoscoe on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:36PM (#20423711)
I've hear the Hoover Dam proposed, and theoretically any existing dam could be converted? Just need to pump some water back upstream when there's excess load in the system.

Here in Canada a lot of our energy is hydroelectric and I know there's a lot of talk about this sort of solution in Quebec.

Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by Obi_Juan_Kenobi on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:49PM (#20424362)
> Just need to pump some water back upstream

In this situation, you'd simply never let the water flow through in the first place. This amounts to releasing water while generating energy, only to pump it back. The net result is just a lot of wasted energy.

Pumped hydro requires two reservoirs. There's no way around it.

Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by cesarb on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:36PM (#20424270)
> theoretically any existing dam could be converted? Just need to pump some water back upstream when there's excess load in the system.

For that, you need water that can be pumped back upstream, that is, you need also a lower reservoir. If your dam discharges directly into a river, you won't have enough water downstream of the dam to pump back upstream. Not all dams have suitable geology to form another reservoir below them. An alternative would be to create a new reservoir higher than the dam, using the existing dam as the lower reservoir, with a set of tunnels with the reversible generator/pumps linking both reservoirs (this new upper reservoir does not need to be in the path of the river).

Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by dreamcompiler on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:26PM (#20423619)
It's not (very) disruptive if you build an artificial closed-cycle lake on an existing elevation difference. But such sites are not very commonly available where storage is needed. You have to refresh the water to compensate for evaporation, and that's about the extent of the impact.

Dammed streams of course are a completely different story.

Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by nanomonkey on Friday July 12, 2019 @09:26PM (#20425937)
I wonder if it would be better to go distributed, pump water into a water tower from a well, or from a municipal source, and then generate electricity and release it back into municipal lines when solar power is not present.
Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ... by jjoonathan on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:46PM (#20423807)
Like that time Banqiao dam burst and killed 100,000 people...