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A comment on Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?. Parent comment

Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by wp381640 on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @09:49PM (#25284702)
Battery was and is never supposed to take up the entire storage load of a network - nobody is designing or forecasting future networks in that way.

Batteries provide fast response

Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them.

This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro

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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by nl on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @10:31PM (#25285024)
To add to this, there are numerous very large scale project already underway to use existing hydro capacity as pumped hydro storage.

Eg, Bath County Pump Storage is a 3GW plant[1] although ironically it is often filled using nuclear power because the hydro station can adapt better to rapid changes in demand.

In the US there is 22GW total pump hydro storage already (compared to say 98GW total nuclear power capacity).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by wp381640 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @12:34AM (#25285752)
add Snowy 2.0 in Australia - 2GW:

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by manfredo on Thursday December 03, 2020 @01:40AM (#25286166)
Pumped hydroelectricity is geographically dependent - you need a valley or mountain that you can dam up to build pumped hydro. While it may be great for South Australia, the region examined in your linked paper, it's wrong to assume that this availability is uniform.
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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by nl on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:26AM (#25299618)
The available isn't uniform, but it sure is widespread!

"The perception has been there are limited sites for pumped hydro around the world, but we have found hundreds of thousands."

https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by manfredo on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:19PM (#25307253)
This paper just ran an algorithm over a heightmap, and pinpointed potential reservoirs. This is a far cry from actually identifying feasible sites. The massive density of hydroelectric storage in the Himalayas, for instance, is far too remote to be developed at anything approaching reasonable cost. Not to mention, it still leaves swathes of places like Central north America, and much of Northern Europe without access to hydroelectric storage.
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Re:Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? by nl on Saturday December 05, 2020 @12:00AM (#25311909)
The European electricity market is already very interconnected, so I doubt that would be a problem there at least.
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