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A comment on The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids. Parent comment

Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by m4rtink on Sunday October 17, 2021 @05:08PM (#28899808)
You can't easily turn just any dam to do pumped storage - you essentially need at least 2 dams, pumping from the lower one to the upper one. Normal dam will simply not have enough water "under" its single dam to pump up when needed.

Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.

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Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by pfdietz on Monday October 18, 2021 @07:21AM (#28904286)
On the other hand, pumped hydro doesn't require the substantial average flow that a hydro generator would need. One build pumped hydro systems where there is no sustained source of surface water flow at all -- for example, in deserts. A proposed pumped hydro facility in Arizona would lose (to evaporation) an order of magnitude less water than a nuclear power plant with capacity = that hydro facility's average throughput.
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