Hacker News Reader

Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

For this, wouldn't it be better to pump water onto the top of a bunch of mountains in Wales?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station, but more.

Pumped water does not scale well, there are only so many mountain valleys to block. And I'd rather keep a few in a somewhat natural state (a magic "no more mountain valleys in exchange for instantly solved climate change" would be attractive nonetheless, even though I write this from a very nice, unblocked mountain valley).

But when your concern is just seasonal storage for heating, you don't need pumped storage. Just great water in a big, isolated tank, it's not even new technology. The surface per volume shrinks the bigger the system, so very large tanks can have quite nice loss numbers.

Actually, there is enormous potential capacity for pumped storage around the world.

Pumped hydro is generally used for diurnal storage. The infrastructure of the dams and turbines is darned expensive; it makes practical sense if you're filling and draining the basin (or half of it) every day, but paying pretty much the same cost to get just a single lake volume per year ... not so much.

That's the point, isn't it? Batteries are not a panacea for energy storage needs, even with a doubling of their capacity.

There is no requirement for a panacea or super neat developments that allow individual households to store seasons worth of privately generated electricity.

For seasonal and sporadic production shortfalls in solar and wind generation, biofuels and electrically synthesized fuels can fill in. On the occasions where carbon-neutral fuel resources are insufficient - gas generation can remain as fallback (increasingly rarely) until sufficient carbon neutral fuel production is developed.

And with atmospheric CO2 capture, CO2 released by intermittent fallback fossil combustion can be scrubbed at a rate well below the peak release rate at the turbines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com