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Pumped Hydro Storage

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Anyone care to discuss or critique the technical and policy aspects of pumped hydro storage? No politics please.

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - Wikipedia

Reading this recent Clean Technica article, I realized pumped hydro storage hasn't been on my radar. I'd been under the impression that it had strict topological requirements, and that the capacity for pumped hydro storage in the USA wasn't much larger than the existing deployments. According to the author, that isn't true — and costs for pumped hydro storage ought to be lower than for battery storage.

A Modest Pumped Storage Proposal For Democratic Candidates | CleanTechnica

[...]

Closed loop pumped hydro storage is one of the best grid-scale electricity storage options available

The NREL and other studies make it clear that it’s one of the cheapest forms of storage available, much cheaper than most alternatives. It’s incredibly stable and mature technology, with the first one having been built in the 1890s. There are an awful lot of skilled resources who know how to work rock who are looking for work because coal is dying and it’s a lot more automated than it used to be. It has great characteristics for 1-7 day storage. The Australian study makes it clear that there’s far more resource capacity than is required. They modeled only 300-meter plus head heights close to grid connectivity with limited height dams and found 250 times as much capacity in the US as was needed.

Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford, a Top 100 Climate Influencer and lead of the team that produced the 100% Renewables by 2050 study, assumed pumped hydro in his modeling.

[...]

Closed loop pumped storage hydro has small ponds, small dams, doesn’t impede streams, doesn’t impact fish spawning, uses over and over a tiny fraction of the fresh water in the States, doesn’t emit CO2e for decades from anaerobic decomposition under reservoirs and doesn’t involve toxic chemicals. But it’s regulated as if developers were building the Hoover Dam, building several hundred foot dams [...]​

I'm omitting the author's call to action for political candidates, because I'd like to keep politics out of this thread.
 
A lot of wishful thinking. The overhead cost of small scale hydro is exorbitant. - ecological reviews, community review, custom site-specific engineering, etc., which actually cost more the construction.

Pumped storage at scale is excellent, but as you mentioned has significant geographic limitations.
 
A lot of wishful thinking. The overhead cost of small scale hydro is exorbitant. - ecological reviews, community review, custom site-specific engineering, etc., which actually cost more the construction.

Pumped storage at scale is excellent, but as you mentioned has significant geographic limitations.

It sounds like you're in violent agreement with the author of the CleanTechnica article. Most of the article is basically about that regulatory overhead. FTA:

Let’s compare and contrast that with pumped storage hydro. The example pumped storage facility from the Australian study was a pair of 247 acre (100 hectare reservoirs) with 810 acre feet (1 billion liters) of water. The reservoirs combined are smaller than Central Park in New York and hold about 2.8% of the water. They don’t block rivers, but are built in places with no streams. They don’t damage fish runs, obviously. They don’t divert or provide a lot of water for irrigation. It holds less than a thousandth of the water the US uses every single day but as stated it just reuses it. That examples provides a GWh of storage, which is a nice juicy chunk. If the top or bottom reservoir dam starts giving way, it’s trivial to quickly pump the water into the stable reservoir. When in operation, it doesn’t accumulate mercury as major hydro dams have been known to do. The small scale means that any submerged biomass turns into trivial amounts of anaerobic CO2 and methane. The environment impacts and risks are virtually non-existent.

But it’s regulated as if it’s blocking a major river, threatening fish stocks and could kill dozens or thousands of people. Regulatory approvals require FERC, the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corp of Engineers to all sign off on complex, detailed, lengthy and very expensive approval documentation.

It’s not as if some people in the United States don’t understand this. There’s now a fast path approval process for pumped storage hydro. It only takes 4 years and $7 million USD instead of $8 years and $15 million per my sources. All three federal organizations still have to sign off on it. That’s not really good enough when 2030 is looming.​
 
It sounds like you're in violent agreement with the author of the CleanTechnica article. Most of the article is basically about that regulatory overhead. FTA:

Let’s compare and contrast that with pumped storage hydro. The example pumped storage facility from the Australian study was a pair of 247 acre (100 hectare reservoirs) with 810 acre feet (1 billion liters) of water. The reservoirs combined are smaller than Central Park in New York and hold about 2.8% of the water. They don’t block rivers, but are built in places with no streams. They don’t damage fish runs, obviously. They don’t divert or provide a lot of water for irrigation. It holds less than a thousandth of the water the US uses every single day but as stated it just reuses it. That examples provides a GWh of storage, which is a nice juicy chunk. If the top or bottom reservoir dam starts giving way, it’s trivial to quickly pump the water into the stable reservoir. When in operation, it doesn’t accumulate mercury as major hydro dams have been known to do. The small scale means that any submerged biomass turns into trivial amounts of anaerobic CO2 and methane. The environment impacts and risks are virtually non-existent.

But it’s regulated as if it’s blocking a major river, threatening fish stocks and could kill dozens or thousands of people. Regulatory approvals require FERC, the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corp of Engineers to all sign off on complex, detailed, lengthy and very expensive approval documentation.

It’s not as if some people in the United States don’t understand this. There’s now a fast path approval process for pumped storage hydro. It only takes 4 years and $7 million USD instead of $8 years and $15 million per my sources. All three federal organizations still have to sign off on it. That’s not really good enough when 2030 is looming.​

I am not in violent disagreement - I strongly agree with "Regulatory approvals for pumped storage hydro in the United States are nuts". However the article is wishful thinking about reducing bureaucratic costs from catastrophic to merely astronomic, and still ignores the custom engineering and low productivity costs.

After (optimistically) wasting only $7 millon on FERC nonsense, the author still ignores the excruciatingly onerous and more irrational state regulatory process - he only discusses federal. Not one cubic yard of dirt has moved yet, and the NIMBYs will be out in full force. "That’s not really good enough when 2030 is looming."

Precisely, and the bureaucracy is only getting worse.

BTW, I have been working on an EPA "remediation" 2 acre project that was budgeted for $100,000 and one year. Twenty one years later, over $2.3 million has been wasted, and at least another million is likely to wasted (printed paper that will not be read) yet not a single gallon of water will be cleaned. ("Remediation" in quotes because nothing is actually getting cleaned as the regulations for this site do not require cleaning, only monitoring).

At least this article is only about wishful thinking, not unicorn farts. Technically it could work. Bureaucratically in the USA, no way. Australia and China are much more effective about building, not bureucracy.