Not sure about the rest of the world, but in the EU we basically maxed out those years (decades?) ago. We won't be getting much more. (I mean, without actual mountains, your pump storage plant is going to be prohibitively expensive.)
> The topic is very complex, there are disadvantages with every form of energy production
True. In France, we had a very recent report[1] that outlines various scenarios towards 2050, and it appeared that the least risky ones involved a fairly diverse energetic mix.
[1]: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy%20p...
Pumped storage is not limited to hydro power dams. All you really need is a hill and water, although it costs less with a depression near the hilltop. No watershed needed.
Actually you do not need the hill. An underground cavity suffices.
And, there are numerous other cheap alternatives.
Right now I would bet on a highly unfavourable comparison to be honest. Dams have the overwhelming advantage of letting you build a relatively small wall (compared to the lake you're holding), to hold a gigantic volume of water. The mountain an the river are already there, so you don't need to build them.
Hydro power systems need to store a year or more. Utilities will need at most a few weeks. You don't need or want a river. Dams are f'ing expensive because they need geological support for extreme pressure. An earthen dike suffices if you don't already have a depression.
Only the penstock needs to hold back high pressure.
I'm aware of dams. I'm not aware of your fancy alternatives. It is therefore reasonable to assume that those fancy alternatives aren't widely deployed. And that the main reason for this is that they're more expensive (per energy unit).
Without sources, your (admittedly plausible) qualitative arguments are just a pretty story.
California has constructed dozens of high-altitude, low-head earthen dams on the same principle, over the past century, with penstocks down to lower-altitude turbines, and has lately converted many of them for pumped hydro.
When there are articles about pumped storage plants the usual problems are not legislative or infrastructure. The biggest issue is that investors don't like to create overcapacity, which mean that there isn't a lot of available renewable energy to buy cheap in order to sell expensively later to recover the cost of storage. When overcapacity occur the enthusiasm for more capacity quickly drop. The secondary issues tend to be more physical in nature. Salt water is very problematic in any situation, so putting pumped storage plants near the ocean has many problems. If you use fresh water you compete with existing utilization, and most suitable locations for pumped storage already have existing hydroelectric power. Fresh water has often a very complex ecosystems and everything from nature to human depend on it.
Hydroelectric power and pumped storage have synergies, they aren't competing.
Stored power isn't overcapacity. Investors care about expensive energy and renewables are the cheapest and cleanest option.
All the existing pumped storage facilities that I know of do not generate their profit from buying low and selling high. They generate profits by providing a service of balancing the grid for short duration so that when a power plant is ramping down, there is a equal force being provided as a service so that the grid doesn't break down. The period of ramping down/up need to be covered somehow, a cost that either the grid operator or the individual power plants need to pay for. The end customer who pays by the kw/h do not see this cost, and it is a very insignificant cost of the whole since it only occur at start and stop.
But I am happy to be proven wrong. Please give me that link of one that buy low and sell high. A commercial operated pumped storage that buy renewable energy when its low and sell when it is high can be scaled up to be used whenever the price difference between low and high is great enough. The cost of operation and investment just need to be low enough that the margin between low and high price points can support it.
It is extremely disingenuous, not to say dishonest, to make up scenarios based on status quo when there is still very little renewable generation capacity.
If you want to blame the lack of renewable generation capacity then feel free to do so. Pumped storage could in theory, in the future, when the time is right, be cost effective. We don't know. We are not there yet. Its a financial model to be to be tested when and if we get there.
For now the financial model for existing pumped storage do not care about the purchasing price or selling price, or what kind of power it is being charged with.
Utilities will need storage, and will build whatever is cheapest. In some places that will be pumped hydro. End of story.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/portugal...
This was probably made possible by the half-dozen pumped storage hydro plants in Portugal. Now they’re putting floating solar on some as well.
But thanks for that link. Tâmega energy storage complex is actually looking like it will be a real renewable storage, using two attached wind farms. Just like with solar, when renewable is combined with storage it makes more sense when the renewable plants is located next to the storage and operated by the same company.
It would be really interesting to hear some numbers from that plant, like how much money they gain by storing the wind power and selling it at a later point in time. It would also be very interesting to see the cost per kw/h, even through at this point in time with energy prices being what they are, I will likely not matter too much.
Ofcourse, you first need surplus solar and wind, and that's what the real problem is. There is still plenty of headroom to build more solar and wind for immediate use before we reach the point where some of the produced energy needs to be stored.
Ammonia will probably turn out more practical as a transportable storage medium. Hydrogen works stored underground.
Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
It's more expensive than mining but not by an order of magnitude
We don't know how feasibly we can get Uranium. The market is unstable right now because of political problems.
The topic is very complex, there are disadvantages with every form of energy production and nuclear isn't an exception. It is only clean if you reduce the question to CO2.