Comment by audunw
2 days ago
Pumped hydro is just not a valid comparison. I wish people would understand that already… it’s only good for long term storage in certain key geographical regions. Its use case is very limited.
You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.
In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs. The costs for pumped hydro are generally reported with their target application in mind. It’s not as applicable to dedicated short term storage and certainly not applicable to frequency regulation.
It's cute you think short cycles are somehow better in gas turbines and compressors and that you will restart the whole thing constantly to fill short term demands
> In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs.
The comparison is valid; If you want to fill hour to hour demand or add some frequency regulation, an inverter with a bunch of batteries is far, far better than this
> You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.
They are still cycled daily, that's the entire point of them that even worked pre renewables - load up on cheap night energy and unload it with demand. Renewables just flipped that to load in solar peak.
And putting few hours worth of batteries to reduce cycling is beneficial in both of those cases.
> It's cute you think […]
Don't do that here.
Ignorant and patronizing answers get snark back.
But it's sad that you get triggered by snark and not... ignorance and/or lying
Ireland is lucky enough to have several suitable sites, but just one operational: Turlough Hill, which has been running for over 50 years and is in use daily. It's at least as useful in terms of grid stability and (relatively) rapid dispatch as capacity. Output ~0.7% of total daily (~120GWh), ~5% of daily peak (~6GW), wintertime figures. For comparison electricity usage has increased about 8-fold since it was deployed in 1974.