And if you already have a hydro dam, it’s more efficient to just stop draining it when demand is low or other sources are active, rather than actually re-filling it then.
Though you might be able to install pumped-storage stations in a few places that don’t get enough precipitation to actually be hydro-power sources.
Do the math on pumped hydro, and you’ll find it’s at best a minor solution in specific areas.
Pumped hydro needs two large reservoirs close together, with a large altitude change between them. Guess how many sites like that there are on the prairies?
The largest pumped hydro in the US is the Bath power station in Virginia. It took 8 years to build in the 1970’s and 1980’s and cost $1.6 billion dollars. One reservoir takes up 555 acres of land, and the other 265 acres. Max storage capacity is 24 GWh. Virginia uses about 306 GWh per day, so the largest facility Virginia has can store about 2 hours of the state’s energy.
We often have situations where wind and solar go pretty much offline for weeks on end in winter. A couple of hours of storage is useful for load shifting away from peak hours, which I assume that station is used for. It’s not a solution for converting intermittant power into baseload power with the ability to store enough to see us through predicted annual energy shortfalls. At today’s costs and the inevitable environmental challenges, there’s no way we can afford to build enough pumped hydro to allow for a wind/solar grid, even if we had enough suitable locations.
Also, these sites are basically dams, and require huge amounts of steel and concrete - two of the highest CO2 emitting materials we have.
And again, most of the best sites are already being developed, there is a real shortage of such sites, and the cost of building all that pumped hydro would be enormous, both in money and environmental cost.
I’m all for building pumped hydro, and if we had a suitable location in Alberta it might be an answer to our problem of power going over $1,000 MWh during peak periods when the sun isn’t shining. But it’s not a backup system for those times when wind and solar aren’t producing - which is a LOT of the time.
And now… solar sidewalks!
Where else can we put them? Maybe we can all wear hats with solar cells on top!
I blame poor science education.
Everyone always talks about developing more efficient solar cells, and that’d be nice, but it’s not really what we need. What we really need is solar cells that are both cheap and durable. Make something that could economically replace asphalt shingles, and it wouldn’t matter if they were only 10% efficient.
OMG, thank you for your breath of reasonableness!
Anyone who drives up through central California and sees the MASSIVE open aqueducts has got to wonder just how much of that precious water is lost to evaporation!
Slapping solar panels over those canals is a brilliant idea, which of course means Those In Power would never consider such a thing. The panels wouldn’t even have to be adjustable, to save headaches from mechanical nightmares. There still would be a incredible amount of electricity to add to the grid.
But see, this makes far too much sense.
~VOW
I don’t know how well they work, I looked at solar shingles when I had a new roof about 8 years ago. They were twice the cost to install as regular shingles, plus another 1/3 for inverters and electrical.
An update to this story. They’re going to try it out by installing a 100 m section on a working rail line next year.
Unless cameras cover every mile, those panels between the tracks would grow legs in nothing flat.