Down with pumped hydro storage, Up with dispatchable hydropower!
Brian Schmidt writes:
So here's the post in a single paragraph: dispatchable hydropower is a massive and mostly unused power storage solution available today to solve the problem of power variability from wind and solar. The claim that power storage is technically infeasible is wrong. There would be an economic cost but it's manageable and getting smaller. Environmental issues could also be addressed, especially because power can be dispatched without turning rivers off. Maybe I'm missing something, but pumped hydro storage seems like just a small part of a bigger solution.
My blogpost headline is a tiny bit exaggerated for effect. I have nothing against pumped hydro storage, it's currently the biggest and most cost-efficient form of energy storage, and it'll be some years before electric batteries will overtake them.
Too cheap to meter in two dimensions !
Pumped storage might be biggest current storage of power, but it's barely a footnote compared to total hydropower generation. Part of the problem for pumped hydro is that it's difficult to scale because you need a place to put decent sized reservoirs (or maybe two reservoirs, one uphill and one downhill) and you need to construct those reservoirs.
The other reason the description of biggest for current pumped storage might belong in scare quotes is that it's a footnote compared to the need for storage in a sustainable system that doesn't use coal or natural gas.
But why settle for dispatchable hydropower, when existing projects aimed at harvesting floating Plastic debris could render it disposable?
Green recycling of the styrofoam coffee cup flotsam awash in the oceans could create light-weight portable hydropower dams to generate lighter-than air hydrogen that can be piped uphill at zero energy cost to uplands suffering from drought & burned to create water to fill empty high-altitude hydropower reservoirs.
The Green New Deal can end the continuing climate crisis by creating a construction job-rich circular disposable dam economy that generates even greener energy using double acting counterflow Escher Turbines driven by simultaneous hydrogen rise and water fall.
