Pumped-storage hydro dam schemes to store wind energy

[adam2]

Does anyone have any updates on this ?
Is actual work starting,or is it still at the studies/reviews/reports/nimbyfests stage.

[Eclipse]

I don't have any updates on the UK.
Indeed - I'm no engineer but I get the feeling from the tone of certain news reports and international organisations like the IRENA and IEA that governments and energy utilities are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they really need to get cracking on the support infrastructure for wind and solar. European reports analyse an EU super grid with solar from the south complementing wind from the colder north across a truly VAST area with HVDC. In a similar vein, there are reports analysing local storage. Sometimes these trade off against each other, but generally they're estimated to be about 30% of the energy transition costs for a clean electricity grid - and the actual wind and solar farms will be 70%. The 30% is a bit like an admission ticket you pay to get access to the super cheap 70%.

But within that 30% - some regions might be weighted more to PHES so 20% PHES 10% HVDC upgrades. Others might benefit from more spending on their HVDC powerlines to pipe power in from a larger area.

Sometimes it's cheaper to build the local PHES. Say you have a 100 MW solar farm but only 50 MW power line to some local town - and it goes over enough distance to make upgrading the 50 MW line REALLY expensive. If you build a PHES next to the 100 MW solar farm, it can pump water up the hill to then sell to the town overnight - effectively continuing the 50 MW. (Or even lower night demand - because solar has a really low capacity factor.)

Here's a little Aussie town that's doing something like that. This PHES is TINY compared to the big monsters we've been talking about. It's for a distant Aussie town of only 500 people, but they have long power lines that take DAYS to drive down and find the gum tree branch that took out the power line. They're sick and tired of being cut off for days at a time, so are building this

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-01/ ... /100579700

[BritDownUnder]

There was a very interesting video presentation on this Walpole, Western Australia project on the Engineers Australia website if you care to pay the $30 cost for non-members to view the webinar. I was amazed that the project actually went ahead.

Project is about 75% complete to date and is an 85 metre head system with water pipes of diameter about 0.9 to 1.1 metre diameter. The generator is actually not directly coupled to the grid but goes via an inverter and a small battery system to allow for no interruptions of supply for instance if the power cut happened when the system was pumping water up hill. Also a solar PV array to allow for some assistance while pumping water uphill during the low price electricity costs in the middle of the day and to account for the higher power requirements for pumping due to inefficiencies of the system. Capacities of the reservoirs was about 170 MLitres and allowed for 5 hours of generation typically.

A lot of the talk went into cost savings and costs of equipment. For instance the manufacturing cost of the pipes was only 15% of the total - transportation being the main cost of the piping work hence they used three diameters of pipes so they could be fitted inside each other to save space on the truck. Pipes were fibreglass not steel and buried.

More discussion on getting the water to fill the system initially (from a borehole and rainwater from an usually wet season) and also the protection devices changes needed to correctly protect the system when running in islanded mode.

[Eclipse]

Yeah - 85 metres ain't high.
"Triple the head, halve the cost" is the rule - according to those who know such things.
Andrew Blakers basically says don't bother unless you're talking 500 m.

I'm just in the middle of something - anyone got time to look up the UK's ocean PHES potential?

There's a special Ocean-side atlas now

https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/

[BritDownUnder]

In this presentation it was all about the money and keeping costs down. Probably Walpole does not have the 300+ metre heads available and in this talk it was mentioned that above 300 metres you have to move to more expensive steel pipes and not fibreglass ones.

Snowy 2.0s woes are a good case in point in the perils of going for a civil engineering-heavy high head project.

[adam2]

Here is some interesting information about the proposed large pumped storage scheme at Coire Glas.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... 463258.pdf

[Eclipse]

Interesting!
Coire Glas power station is a proposed 1.5GW pumped storage hydroelectric power station in the Scottish Highlands. If built, it will double the UK's ability to store energy for long periods. [1] [2]

Depending on final design, the power station would have a generating capacity of up to 1500MW, and be able to store up to 30GWh of energy.

[adam2]

It states power, 1.5GW, but not energy. When fully 'charged', how long can it maintain 1.5GW?

Has the backsliding started already ? Earlier reports did indeed refer to a 1.5 GW capacity.
Then it was "up to 1.5 GW"
And now 1.3 GW capacity is being widely quoted.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coire_Glas_power_station

[kenneal - lagger]

They have to decide whether they are in the market for short term high power back up or longer term lower power and it looks as if they are going for the 20 hour market rather than the television advert/tea break. The latter market is well catered for already and it is the longer term storage that is being used by the antis as a potential problem for renewable generation.

[Eclipse]

Here in Australia one of our most popular Energy Transition podcasts - that regularly interviews politicians and CEOs from different energy and tech companies - has concluded we may not need much pumped hydro at all. The main thing seems to be getting the HVDC in to increase the "Law of large numbers" and "Geographic smoothing" - See Scientific American 2015. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/pl ... rtunities/

We might get away with extra HVDC because we're lucky as far as renewables goes. We're in the Sunshine Belt!



BUT WHAT ABOUT A COLD WINTER IN THE UK?

HVDC powerlines are now so efficient they only lose 1.6% per 1000 km. So that means a solar farm on the equator could hypothetically run a base at the North or South Pole 10,000 km away for only 16% power loss!

But the lines doesn’t have to stretch all the way to the equator. EG: The UK will get about 8% of their power from a massive renewables project in Morocco 4000 km away. They’ll only lose 6.4%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Mo ... er_Project

In the same way, Canada and the northern States in the USA could feed off southern solar. EG: Mexico City to Alaska via HVDC is only 11% loss.

RENEWABLE SCEPTICS like to cherry-pick national studies into some smaller European country like Germany or Italy. But if it’s important for a large continent like Australia which is IN the Sunshine Belt to link up in a super-grid, how much more important is it for Germany which is 21 times smaller and OUTSIDE the Sunshine Belt!? Fortunately the EU are aware. EG: Alexander Roth, et al 2023 concluded that just linking up the core 12 European countries would reduce storage requirements 30%. And the EU’s 27 nations are part of the ENTSO-E super-grid anyway! ENTSO covers 35 countries with 532 MILLION customers. It’s an area a third larger than Australia! Talk about a “Law of large numbers”.

Youtuber “Real Engineering” – 2020 explains the EU will save *$12 to $40 BILLION annually* by integrating their super-grid. https://youtu.be/gacGuWjqKco

While I think regional super-grids will probably do the job, in the next generation or so they might start thinking about a GLOBAL grid. A solar farm at mid-day could power a city somewhere on directly the opposite side of the planet at midnight, 20,000 km away - for only 32% power loss. That’s more efficient than the long-term storage of say hydrogen at only 40% to 50% efficient. Putting geopolitics aside and looking at it just economically, it seems to be a 3 way competition between HVDC powerlines, batteries, or massively Overbuilding renewables. Which combination is cheaper? Our grandchildren will have to figure that one out. But a global grid might only need 9 horizontal and vertical HVDC lines. Google "Research and Outlook on Global Energy Interconnection" by Jun Li et al, 2020.

[clv101]

That 3/4 people live +/- 35°C is pretty scary considering the likelihood of a +3°C warmer world, maybe double that figure over land.

[kenneal - lagger]

If I lived in Australia I would like to build either a multi generational or multi family courtyard house such as is common in India and the middle east. Included would be heavy weight construction, underground rooms with cool air circulation, trees and fountains in the
courtyard and a minimal number of windows in the outer wall.

We, in the UK, should be looking at the widest range of generation technologies as well to spread the amount of time that electricity is generated and the number of weather situations under which we can generate power. This spread will reduce the amount of storage necessary.