Comment by pydry

>The article goes into detail on why the 350GWh figure you used for your calculation is a lie

Their claims don't make a lot of sense though.

>The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.

So... it's a battery that doesn't get filled up. Cool I guess we need to produce more power so we can utilize it better? No. They want it shut down.

>The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.

And? It's simple physics - you push water uphill that stores power. Push it uphill again and you store even more power.

>Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough

"Oh no, we haven't built enough solar and wind yet to match the storage capacity of this enormous battery. Let's just stop building it!" wtf?

>An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries: https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...

This article looks even more like bitterness from the competition and they seem similarly COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of comparing what they call a "blowout cost" to the cost of batteries. Probably because 3.7x still blows chemical batteries out of the water and they're acutely aware of that fact being inconvenient.

>But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule

You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.