New England's Largest Battery Is Hidden Inside a Mass. Mountain (2016)
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wbur.org
We pulled into the visitor's center, outside of the mountain. He often took the family to things like this because he worked for the power company, so I just thought we were stopping at a place that he heard of at work. Then we got into a bus and drove inside and took a tour.
That was one of the coolest things I ever saw as a teenager.
I remember getting semi-private, and slightly off-the-official-track tour of a nuclear power plant by my Dad. His company was involved in servicing the plant during an outage. It was open for organized public tours during that time (an idea that just seems bonkers now). My brothers and I got to see that part, and even a little bit more.
I was pre-teen at the time and unfortunately he has passed. I really wish I could get more details from him on this and other stories.
Some of the memorable things were being able to go into the control room with a bunch of green screens, walking up to the spent fuel pool, a drive through tour on a school bus through the outdoor spent fuel storage facility, and seeing an SGI workstation (with 3D shutter goggles!) that they used to model water flow of Lake Ontario in the event of an inadvertent release. I distinctly remember the unique smell of the second plant, something akin diesel exhaust.
This would be unheard of in this day and age.
It was a different time.
I now do the same thing with my (now) teenager. He grumbles about it now that he's older, but he still enjoys it.
A section of the upper reservoir's dam wall was overtopped, the pumps continued to run, and the section failed, releasing a billion gallons of water in 12 minutes. The flow washed away the forest and soil down to the bedrock. One home was destroyed and its occupants injured, though thankfully there were no deaths.
The failure had several causes, but the most infamous one is that the failsafe gauge had been moved above the top of the dam wall to avoid false positives.
The reservoir was repaired and as far as I know continues to operate. I backpacked in the area several times and the dam wall has a striking appearance on the horizon.
> "I think the goal of our facility would be to look at the opportunities to purchase purely green, renewable power and be able to supply green power to the grid," he says.
So right now it's fueled by... gas and coal.
They could just buy clean, green energy from up north (if lobbyists hadn't killed the project). [0]
[0] https://apnews.com/article/election-2021-maine-hydropower-li...
It is never just one thing you care about. CO2 matters. Price matters. Safety matters. Aesthetics matters. Public relations matters. Not all matter the same amount, but none are irrelevant either. Finding a real world solution is about making the best trade offs possible. You can’t just identify the most important factor and declare that the n-1 others are irrelevant
I mean, yeah obviously. I'm poking fun at them for talking a big game about climate and solar/wind while actually shifting base load energy back to coal.
Nuclear is far safer per kwh and takes up less land (Aesthetics).
Coal seems like they traded some cost savings and less nuclear outrage for less safety, higher CO2 out put, and the cost of looking like condescending hypocrites. But that's just like one man's opinion.
Cost is the main reason for nuclear plants to be closed. The companies operating them have to make a profit and that's hard when your competition runs circles around you in terms of cost and undercut your pricing to the point where you are losing money. Keeping aging, expensive nuclear plants open costs a lot of money and requires continuous investments. It simply can't be done without tax payer money and a state protected monopoly on prices.
Sounds like they care about both carbon and money. Smart.
Do you have actual stats on what the current power mix is?
Looking it up, it seems they only use coal in that region during peak periods, when pumped storage won't be running, so they're probably already close to 100% clean.
If he later touches on this location as well, I apologize, but the intro didn't indicate it might
> Engineering studies for the plant began in October 1964, with early site preparation starting three years later. In 1972 its 1,168 megawatts (1,566,000 hp) hydroelectric plant became operational as the largest such facility in the world.[citation needed] The facility was built to balance the supply from the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.[3]
A very common reason for building these historically.
Damn. Just a little more and they'd be making "1.21 gigawatts, Marty!"
> Northfield Mountain is a naturalist's wonderland. But if you look around, you'll see an unnatural site: a 5-billion-gallon battery.
Energy capacity: 5b gallons * 8.35lbs/gallon * kWh/2,655,220ft-lb (pounds raised 1 ft) = 15.6MWh per foot raised or lowered. At $10m, that's a ridiculous amount of capacity.
This is 10M$/15.66MWh/ft. The last is what makes this absurdly cheap. If those 5b gallons are raised up from the source only 1 foot, it'd be $0.64/watt-hour, more expensive.
But if you lift that water up 6 feet, it's down to $0.1/watt-hour, and suddenly you're at parity for the best anyone can expect. Lift that water up a 200 ft hill and you're down to $0.0032/watt-hour stored. Lifting a huge body of water is a colossal amount of work, it turns out, and thats what makes pumped hydro storage absurdly cost-effective.
Please also note the other comment. Apparently the new 5b gallon project is not $10m, it's unknown what it will cost, the $10m was for an old project. Even without knowing the cost of this new project, I expect the final figures will blow li-ion storage prices out of the water. For ex, if it it cost 10x more, $100m, but is up a 200ft hill, it's still $0.032/watt-hour. And there's really not a strong reason to stop at 200ft either; it's limited mostly by whatever the terrain offers (and how cost effectively one can engineer strong pumps & tubes. turns out we're pretty awesome at that.).
... uh, no. Pumps force the water up into the reservoir; gravity alone pulls the water back down and through the turbine-driven generators.
> Actually, the Sisyphean labor of pumping water up and down the mountain is a net energy loss -- more electricity is used then generated.But because off-peak electricity costs less than the price Northfield gets for what it generates when demand is high, the system is a moneymaker.
I think I understand what they’re saying but it makes it sound wasteful
Just in case it's not clear to anyone (or to you) they pump the water up the mountain with cheap (often renewable) energy when there's a surplus, and then release it instead of turning on the more expensive gas generators to fuel the peak demand.
This is the equivalent of storing water from a river in a reservoir when you aren't watering your field. Sure, some of it evaporates but you aren't just letting it run into the ocean.
It may be cheaper to just offer time of use pricing to incentivize demand response. EV charging, washing machines, and dishwashers use timers to shift demand to off-peak hours. HVAC and water heaters can be connected via smart grid switches or thermostats. Precooling or preheating can be exploited. During the highest demand days temperatures can be relaxed or units can be duty cycled by splitting customers' units into four groups A B C D and running each for 15 min. to smooth out a soften a sharp spike in total demand.
Your better off putting floating solar panels on top
It's not 100%, but it's not bad.
For existing dams the ability to share the existing connections in an area that probably isn't flat except for the water is neat.
US peak demand is around 700 GW. That is about 0.25 km3 of water with 3000 m of elevation.
This is a lake 5km x 5 km and 10 m deep
When you need X from renewable you actually need 4X at least to be sure having enough in bad moments, energy is extremely* important and we can't going soft with it. Hydro is largely the best renewable since is almost constant (with their seasons, but still pretty stable) however is not as predictable and constant ad an NPP or an oil/gas/coal one.
So far very few countries have been able to run on mostly hydro only, all small, with little industry and very mountainous. Unfortunately too many dream miracles of free energy everywhere instead of trying...
Or to be less vague: I understand you think a country can run with hydro storage, I think definitely not for most countries: yes we can regulate our network frequency with pumped storage, when energy demand goes down (for instance also because p.v. and eolic produce much) we pump water in altitude and we release it when demand grow. It's nice and it does work very well: ONLY if our storage in altitude suffice for FAR more than our normal needs. Enough more to have water during a drought period + high energy demand, enough to survive days etc.
If you live nearby a waterfall or a quick/big enough river you might get 99% of your needs out of it to power your home. But at a nation scale is much more complicated and 99% would be still not enough...
You said there is not enough water and mountains. This is the point I disagree with. For pumped storage you don't need a river or to worry about drought. Just coastline with mountains.
1 small lake could store enough to power the US for a peak hour. 20 could store enough for a day.
Yes you would need to charge them, yes it would cost money. But geograpy is not the limiting factor for most countries.
Not only: a small lake can store enough for a single home, not more. Pumped storage is far from efficient in energy terms. Consider a thing: we (nearly all nations on the world) have already implemented much of the hydro we can make, simply because it's effective and cheap. We can just do a bit more, but a bit.
BTW the principle is:
- you have a large basin in altitude, with some gates to control the falling flow
- you have a river with a low altitude lake because anyway you do not pump all water back, nor you can't recovery it once used to produce energy and we talk about much water
- you have pipes and turbines and pumps with other pipes
Normally you let a bit of water falling in the pipes making turbines turn producing electricity. When demand low a little bit you just divert part of the falling water out of turbines, eventually pumping back a bit, if the demand fall MUCH you need to consume to keep the network frequency. Normal hydro pump back very little water. With p.v. and eolic who can produce a significant amount of energy just few hours/day you can pump more. So from the low altitude basin/lake you pump back to the higher one. That's is. Depending on the meteo you need to dump more or less water, or you have too little quantity to produce etc.
That simple game means you can't do hydro anywhere on any mountains and grabbing water even far from them.
You don't know what you are talking about