Comment by pbmonster
11 hours ago
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
This is incorrect. There is currently not a single pumped hydro station that is suitable for seasonal storage. They're all designed to drain their upper reservoir in 4-16 hours.
It's the only thing that's half economical. Do the math: Even a modest power plant - 1 GW output - that can run for 1000 hours means you need a 1 TWh (even typing it feels ridiculous) storage reservoir. If you only have 100m of head, that's 3 cubic kilometers of water. That would mean building an artificial lake that immediately would be Norway's 6th largest body of fresh water, and draining it completely every winter.
And effectively, you'd have to build it twice - you also need a lower reservoir. Because there's nowhere to get 3 cubic kilometers of fresh water to fill it otherwise, and you really don't want to do pumped hydro with seawater.
And yet it's still far cheaper than any other form of seasonal storage.
Seasonal storage is crazy expensive. You need a lot of power, and a lot of energy, but you can only amortize the cost over one or two usages per year.
Norway already have seasonal storage with a storage capacity equivalent to 6-8 months of total electricity use in the form of its existing hydroelectric plants, with no need to pump things back up again.