It would be stupid to spend on storage before there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime they spend, sensibly, on renewable generating capacity.

By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.

The storage should be built in conjunction with the renewable generation to avoid those excess grid damaging events which is just wasteful. Similar issue to US where constructing generation is being subsidised but not constructing storage along with it.

There are no "grid damaging events".

Correct, because they price it negatively to avoid that happening. It's still indicative of a problem.

Batteries will probably be cheaper, but pumped hydro storage will probably cost about the same since it's a mature technology.

I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography.

Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as the U.S. uses (as electrical energy) in 24 hours. The idea of moving that amount of water around on short time scales is hard to fathom.

The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, unless a massively cheaper battery chemistry takes over.

Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".

I suppose I should have clarified that I meant "lake Mead if at capacity" which it isn't.

Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).

The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.

If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).

There are dozens of such reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada range in California. None of them will take as much water as Lake Mead, but they don't need to.

The cost of batteries is actually rising, now that manufacturing costs only make up ~25% of a battery's cost [1]. The remaining 75% is raw materials, dominated by the cathode and anode, which are having trouble keeping up with demand [2].

1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...

The cost of batteries is immaterial to anything being discussed here.

As you already knew l.

From the previous comment:

> Batteries will probably be cheaper,

The above commenter clearly thinks that batteries are going to provide cheap storage.

If you have some alternative plan for storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours, please do tell.

It has been explained to you numerous times already.

Trolling is unwelcome here.

So just to make sure I'm understanding you: you insist that storage is a solved problem. It's solution is so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree it's an easy problem is trolling. But on the other hand, you are unwilling to mention how grid scale energy storage in a majority renewable grid will work.

It has been explained to you numerous times already.

You may repeat your lies as much as you like. I will point out that you are lying, each time.

Who do you imagine you are fooling?

you are the one trolling, claiming that a mature technology of hydroelectric dams will get chesper, and making various disingenious argunents like insenuating there are magical locations where oceans of water can be stored at the peak of mount everest

Who do you imagine you will fool?

I'd imagine we'll probably continue to store power the same way the vast majority of power is stored now, using pumped hydroelectric storage.

Pumped storage is geographically limited: as more convenient sites are developed, viable locations become more and more remote. Hydroelectric storage is great, but not the pumped kind. The energy storage supplies by the Hoover dam, the Coolie dam, dwarf pumped hydro.

It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.

Pumped storage is not, in fact, geographically limited. There are very few places without any hills nearby. There is absolutely no shortage of hills.

Which you knew, if only because it has been pointed out to you numerous times.

But you prefer to repeat your lies, hoping no one will call attention to them.

Pumped storage requires a nearby hill with a lake on top of it (otherwise earth and concrete has to be poured to form an artificial reservoir), and a nearby lower reservoir, and a nearby source of water. And if it isn't close to transportation infrastructure, building a facility becomes prohibitively expensive. As the optimal sites are developed, less and less suitable sites need to be developed.

Why is New York building battery storage at $567/KWh [1] if pumped storage is so cheap?

There a vast amount of hydro storage potential in the Himalayas, but good luck developing any of it.

1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...

It has already been explained to you numerous times that the above is false. Who do you imagine you will fool this time?

Edit: I've taken a closer look at your recent comments in other threads and it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently and so aggressively that I've banned your account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

---

Original post:

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been posting tons of unsubstantive and flamebait comments and even (as here) crossing into personal attack. Besides being the sort of thing we ban accounts for, this has the disadvantage of discrediting your own view, which is a bad thing if you happen to be right.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you about well over a dozen times in the past, which is not cool.

Edit: you've posted over 80 comments in this thread alone- most of them flamewar comments. That's extreme. Please don't do anything like that on HN again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

Edit 2: you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other threads recently too. As I said, we've warned you many times. If you keep it up we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this. It's seriously not ok.

This was definitely the right call.

> we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up

that's not how that works.

also:

Dunkelflaute is 0.5% - 1.5% per year and only very rarely for longer than 24h. peaker power plants are turned off most of the time today and a combination of those and decentralized battery storage will easily buffer Dunkelflaute in Germany.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

In fact, many believe that storage as hydrogen shows promise. There are many test plants for this right now in areas with a lot of wind and connection to the national gas grid.

The idea is that the hydrogen can then be used in existing gas power plants.

Hydrogen is one of many practical storage media. Many will be used, different ones favored in different places. Hydrogen is particularly suited for places with large, stable underground cavities.

hydrogen has a relatively poor efficiency compared to battery storage electricity to store and back, and it's an highly flammable, infamously explosive gas. but it has a high energy density and it can be transported relatively well. hydrogen will find it's niche.