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Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by jjk166 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:27PM (#33362747)
It is ridiculously uneconomical to create the volume for pumped storage. For context, with 100 meters of pressure head, you'd need 25,000 olympic swimming pools worth of water to store 12 hours of electricity from a 1 GW electric plant with 70% roundtrip efficiency. At a cost of $216/cubic yard of excavation, that's over $17 Billion. If you can make 3 cents per kwh profit buying at low times and selling at high, it would take 129 years to cover just the costs of digging the hole at the high spot. Then you need to dig another hole of the same size at the low spot so you can reuse the water.

There are really only 3 options - dam up a watershed so you can get a huge volume without much structure, build your resevoir on top of a mountain so you can get much larger pressure head and thus require less volume, or reuse a hole you were digging anyways such as an open pit mine. In all three cases you are heavily constrained by geography.

Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by whatshisface on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:29PM (#33362774)
It is a good thing then that nature has already done the excavation for us by providing high and low spots.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by jjk166 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:50PM (#33363065)
Yep, now we just need to excavate the reservoirs on those high and low spots, a mere 100% of the work required.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by brianwawok on Thursday October 27, 2022 @10:59PM (#33367089)
This is nonsense. We have lakes already. We don’t dig two giant holes in rock. Look at real work pumped storage costs.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by int_19h on Friday October 28, 2022 @12:23AM (#33367661)
That's the "geographically dependent" part.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by pencilguin on Friday October 28, 2022 @02:12AM (#33368223)
Except, not.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by int_19h on Friday October 28, 2022 @05:06PM (#33377920)
Lakes aren't geographically dependent?
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by pencilguin on Friday October 28, 2022 @06:56PM (#33379016)
Don't need any lakes.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by int_19h on Sunday October 30, 2022 @12:27AM (#33391083)
Mind the thread context.

"This is nonsense. We have lakes already."

Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by pencilguin on Friday October 28, 2022 @02:11AM (#33368220)
Maybe you could read up, instead of guessing.

Dikes are a technology older than writing.

Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by fastaguy88 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @04:36PM (#33363684)
I am curious where the 216/yd cost comes from. I had a rock driveway put in at 10/yd, and I assume the stone was excavated from somewhere.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by Kubuxu on Thursday October 27, 2022 @05:48PM (#33364497)
Usually the rock is waste from excavation. When buying it you pay the cost of transport, group that did the excavation might have even paid for the rock to be removed.
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by im3w1l on Thursday October 27, 2022 @06:29PM (#33364854)
Excavating a circle of area A costs O(A). Building a wall around a circle of area A costs O(A^0.5).
Re:Why Is Hydroelectricity So Green, and yet Unfashionable? by idiotsecant on Thursday October 27, 2022 @09:59PM (#33366635)
I think you'll find the attached link is project currently in development that does exactly what you're saying is economically impossible. It clearly is not impossible to build a relatively shallow dikes on top of a butte.