Such as? Most storage facilities are targeting a few hundred megawatts of storage, usually enough for a few hours of power but not enough to even out a full night.
As the market changes and it becomes profitable to supply power at night, more batteries are trivially added. But while we still have so many fossil sources for the lull in demand at night, energy prices are at their lowest during the night.
As more fossil generation is replaced with renewables, more storage will be added.
Batteries have a clear scaling path, plenty of materials, and are growing 10x at a predictable rate.
Scaling batteries is utterly trivial compared to the challenges facing SMRs.
The historical record is right there for everyone to see. Batteries are a serious industry, at a serious scale, with serious engineering and real timelines and improvements. The entire nuclear industry are charlatans and lightweights compared to what's happened in batteries and renewables. Which is a shame, because nuclear could have had a chance, perhaps.
Scaling batteries is the opposite of trivial. I don' think you comprehend the mismatch between our battery supply and what grid storage demands. The US consumes about 500 GWh of of electricity every hour. This is more than the cumulative global battery production in all of 2021 [1]. And the cost of batteries has stopped shrinking and started rising [2]. The reality is that we'll be hard-pressed just to keep battery production growing fast enough to satisfy EVs. Lithium battery production will probably double or triple, but that's still not enough to make grid storage feasible.
How many countries have provisioned a day's worth of electricity storage? Half a day? An hour? For all the talk about nuclear power being charlatans and lightweights, no country at al has produced the majority of its electricity from intermittent sources. But nuclear has [3]. Pretty good for a bunch of charlatans!
1. https://www.interactanalysis.com/lithium-ion-battery-market-....
2. https://www.ft.com/content/31870961-dee4-4b79-8dca-47e78d29b...
One more snowy 2 (or equivalent) and Australia can get to ~97% solar+wind+pumped storage powered.
The only reason existing pumped storage sites used to target a few hundred MWh was because they were historically used for regulating the grid, not providing large scale storage.
The geography to do this is plentiful too, as multiple studies have confirmed.
In case you're unfamiliar with how pumped hydro works: There's an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. To charge the system, water from the lower reservoir is pumped into the upper reservoir, and to withdraw energy the water is passed to the lower reservoir driving a turbine.
In Snowy 2, the upper reservoir is large enough to accommodate 350 GWh of energy. But the lower reservoir is not, and actually attempting to actually use that much storage would cause the closed loop system to lose water and permanently reduce the storage capacity unless additional water is added. If I have a 100 liter bucket up top and a 10 liter bucket down below. If I fill up the 100 liter bucket to the brim I could drain 100 liters once, but then I'd lose 90 liters and only have enough water to fill it back up to 10 liters. So does it have a capacity of 100 liters? In a pedantic sense, yes, but in practice you only have 10 liters of usable capacity.
Pumped hydro storage requires very specific geography to function, so deceptive messaging is often required to convince people of its efficacy.
The 240 and 40 are also a lowball because parts of the losses were already accounted for at the beginning. That part is the double count.
Also, you insist that there's an error in this analysis - "double counting" - yet you neglect to actually explain what was wrong with it. This [1] is the report that arrived at the 40 GWh figure.
> Whilst Talbingo’s level could be reduced to provide ‘space’ for Snowy 2.0 Tantangara water, this would reduce the energy storage and efficiency of Tumut 3. As Tumut 3 has 60 GWh of storage when Talbingo is full, any reduction in Talbingo water levels would reduce that capacity, which can be delivered at 1,800 MW for up to 33 hours. A reduction would also (marginally) reduce the efficiency of Tumut 3. Another reason to keep Talbingo close to full is that a call on Snowy 2.0 to generate for 7 days would normally be most unlikely. Also, Tumut 3 can very quickly generate and create space in Talbingo for Snowy 2.0 water, though this still means discharging water to Blowering, beyond whatever spare capacity there was in Jounama at the time. So, if the current operational arrangement remains largely intact, the available capacity for Snowy 2.0 before water is lost to Blowering would be approximately 28 GL. This volume equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 40 GWh (28/239x350) – i.e. 20 hours at 2,000 MW.
If more than 40 GWh of storage were used, Snowy 2 would reduce the capacity of other hydro electric plants. It's the estimate of 350 GWh that relied on double counting, not the 40 GWh figure. If this analysis is wrong, then actually explain what's wrong with it instead of just insisting that it's double counting.
1. https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRest...
Trying to paint this as 40GWh is the very definition of bad faith.
But doing so would reduce the usable storage of other facilities using the same body of water. This is explained here:
> At the extreme, the water stored in Talbingo/Jounama could be reduced to 28 GL. This would allow 160 GL of Tantangara water to be accommodated in Talbingo. This equates to a recyclable energy storage capacity for Snowy 2.0 of about 235 GWh (160/239x350). In this case the energy capacity of Tumut 3 is reduced from 60 GWh to 10 GWh, so the net energy storage is 185 GWh (235-50).
How much can Snowy 2 store without adversely impacting other storage facilities? 40 GWh.
Cycling 240 GWh of energy would almost entirely eliminate Tumut 3's storage capacity, and yield a net increase in storage capacity increase of only 185 GWh. 240 GWh is only correct if we ignore the capacity reduction of Tumut 3. And of course, I doubt Tumut 3's operators would agree to this scenario without being bought out because it'd destroy their ability to turn a profit and have a chilling effect on future hydro projects.
So yeah, bad faith. And now you've had it pointed out twice it's just lying.
The issue is that the maximum cyclical storage capacity is determined by the minimum of both the upper and lower reservoirs. Snowy 2's lower reservoir is Tumut 3's upper reservoir. And Tumut 3's lower reservoir is barely 1/10th the size of Snowy 3's upper reservoir. That's the bottleneck.
If your point is that we should just accept the fact that Tumut 3 can't be run at full capacity if Snow 2 is deployed, then yes that's correct.
> The downstream dams dispatch their dispatchable energy and you leave enough water in the middle two that the maximum can be pumped back upstream
Right: in order for Snowy 2 to avoid losing any water, then Tumut 3's upper reservoir (which, remember is Snowy 2's lower reservoir) has to start empty in order to accommodate the water from Snowy 2. And then Tumut 3 can't drain this water when prices are high because Snowy 2 needs it re-charge its upper reservoir when electricity prices are low. In order to run Snow 2 at maximum cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 has to essentially become totally subservient to it.
Imagine I have 3 cups: 30 Liter cup flows to/from a 15 liter cup, to a 5 liter cup. I only have 20 liters of actual cyclic storage capacity, not 50. The 15 and 5 liter cups have to start empty in order to catch the water flowing down from the 30 liter cup. If the 15 and 5 liter cup started full, they'd overflow and lose water.
So if Snowy 2 is running at max cyclic capacity, Tumut 3 can only store and release the water that can fit in its lower reservoir (the 5 liter cup). That's why running snowy 2 at max cyclic capacity would completely shaft Tumut 3.
> The extra dispatchable energy is an upside. It's like having a battery that can't be charged past 70% but fills itself the rest of the way.
But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
Imagine you have company A that sells a battery that stores 1 GWh and you can charge and discharge it at a rate of 200 MW and charge it at a rate of 200 MW. Company B sells a battery that stores 10 GWh for the same price that can also discharge at a rate of 200 MW, but it's super sensitive to charging and can only be charged at a rate of 1 MW - it'll take a month and a half to get back to 10 GWh.
Which of these batteries is more useful? The first one, by a massive margin.
> But that metaphorical battery fills itself very slowly. It's not cyclic capacity and thus isn't nearly as useful.
It's seasonal storage. The fastest it can empty or fill is a week. A renewable grid doesn't ever require it to run at max power until it is empty and then fill at max power until it is full. That's a failure mode of a grid with large centralised production that has major unplanned outages like nuclear plants.
Is a load balancing or grid forming battery more useful? Yes. Can snowy 2 form a buffer for 350GWh of energy consumption in any realistic scenario? Also yes.
What about them? Those aren't pumped hydro storage plants, they're just normal dams. There's no pump: you can't supply them with electricity to pump water back into the reservoir.
Cyclable capacity is the only type of capacity anyone cares about. Again imagine I sell someone a battery claiming it has 10 GWh of capacity. they drain 10 KWh, and then they try to charge it back up but it stops at only 3 KWh. They call tech support and I say "well, sir, the battery only has 3 KWh of cyclable capacity." I guarantee you >99% of people would think they were cheated. Saying that the battery has a capacity of 10 KWh is highly misleading; it's only true in a pedantic sense.
The whole point of Australia's storage plans is to even out solar energy's daily output. The plan is to pump the water into the upper reservoir during the day, and release it at night. The requires cyclical storage. The trickle of water that precipitation puts into the upper reservoir is negligible.
...which it can do by curtailing or releasing the dispatchable energy in tumut 2 if tumut 3 needs to adjust
also the 'trickle' is an entire watershed, not surface precipitation
In all practical senses, over the time scales for which seasonal storage is required, snowy 2 adds 240-350GWh of load shifting. Your sleight of hand doesn't work I already know where the ball is.
Looping back to my battery analogy. The extra 7 Kwh of non-cyclical storage could come in hand if you needed to use it for an extended period of time if the power goes out. But it's not useful if you need to use it every day. Australia, California, and plenty of other energy markets need cyclical storage that is used every day/night cycle to smooth out the duck curve[1].
If you had clarified that most of Snowy 2's storage capacity is not suitable for cyclical storage from the outset, this whole tangent could have been averted. Cyclical storage is the kind of storage that it's in demand, so it's important not to present non-cyclical storage that has a very limited recharge rate as equivalent to a lithium battery.
It can diurnally cycle around 7% of australia's electricity production, it can provide several days power (about 5) at times when the dams are slightly lower (ie. The only time it is needed) and has the capability to provide a week of power (at the same 7%) if circumstances are not par for the course. It can regenerate any water it needs to expel in such a situation in a few weeks using Tumut 2's regular output. Only in conditions of severe drought does its capacity stay down at the 240GWh range.
Anyone with the ability to use arithmetic and basic logic can infer this from the diagram you linked.
Also there is plenty of precedent for something called a battery where using the full nameplate capacity has a high cost and is not easily reversible. It's called a lead acid battery and was one of the most common chemistries for the better part of a century
But it regenerates this very slowly. It'd take over a month to recharge. Again, you can't compare a pumped storage reservoir with a precipitation-based reservoir (aka a dam). With the former you put energy in and energy is stored. With the latter you just have to wait for the rains to fall. This is not useful for cyclical, or as you insist we word it, diurnal storage. Anyone with a solid grasp of logic can see that, too.
> Also there is plenty of precedent for something called a battery where using the full nameplate capacity has a high cost and is not easily reversible. It's called a lead acid battery and was one of the most common chemistries for the better part of a century
Lead acid batteries only last ~300 cycles so you'd have to replace them every year if used for cyclical storage. This is why lithium based battery chemistries are used.
The refill comes from tumut 2. And again, it's a 2GW storage that provides diurnal, five day, and seasonal. Do try to comprehend basic concepts like 'water that goes through a dam goes to the lower reservoir'.
> Lead acid batteries only last ~300 cycles so you'd have to replace them every year if used for cyclical storage. This is why lithium based battery chemistries are used.
This doesn't matter. It's called a battery and you can't typically use nameplate capacity. It's exactly the thing you keep acting outraged about. It's also probably the thing most associated with the word battery other than single use cells.
And for the fourth time, this water is from precipitation. You can't supply electricity to it and pump more water. It's not storage in the sense that you can supply it with a GWh of electricity and later tap the energy you put into it. You're literally saying every single dam is a "pumped storage" facility even if there's no way to pump water into the upper reservoir. Do try to comprehend the difference between pumped storage and a dam.
> This doesn't matter. It's called a battery and you can't typically use nameplate capacity. It's exactly the thing you keep acting outraged about. It's also probably the thing most associated with the word battery other than single use cells.
If you're not running them at full depth of discharge then you're cutting down your usable storage capacity. If you're running 1 GWh of batteries but you're only going to 50% depth of discharge to extend longevity then you've really only provisioned 500 MWh of storage.
But they're sold and advertised based on the emount of energy they can dispense when full. Once you use that much energy you can never store that much again. And everyone is fine with this. Snowy 2 is less limited than this.
> And for the fourth time, this water is from precipitation. You can't supply electricity to it and pump more water. It's not storage in the sense that you can supply it with a GWh of electricity and later tap the energy you put into it. You're literally saying every single dam is a "pumped storage" facility even if there's no way to pump water into the upper reservoir. Do try to comprehend the difference between pumped storage and a dam.
Every single dam is storage. It's why so many were built in the nuclear boom. The 40GWh can be cycled any time, the 240GW can be cycled at any point it is needed in any real scenario (ie. When water levels are not at max and tumut 3 is also using its storage in the same direction). The rest is recharged by curtailing normal hydroelectric flow later (by putting renewable energy into the grid) on seasonal timescales. The system needs to dispense a certain amount of water anyway so the full 350 is available cosistently on a seasonal basis. You may have a point if you were asserting calling it 350 rather than 240 was a bit misleading without further context and caveats (ie. Only once or twice a year and only for that 'week long renewable drought' so beloved of stans of generation technologies that go offline for weeks unexpectedly like coal), but you weren't. Instead you were yelling that it was 40.
Ergo bad faith.
Right, but renewables need storage that we can charge and discharge daily, not seasonal storage. We're back to the 10 KWh battery that can only be charged to 3 kwh on demand.
> Every single dam is storage. It's why so many were built in the nuclear boom.
Renewable growth predated the nuclear boom by a long margin: concrete and effective turbines made possible bid advances in hydropower around the 1930s and 1940s. This is when the Hoover dam, the Coulee dam, and most of the other big hydro power plants were built. The nuclear boom was in the 1960s and 70s.
> The 40GWh can be cycled any time
And again, this is the main form of storage we need to flatten out the duck curve.
> the 240GW can be cycled at any point it is needed
Yes, but then it takes a long time to refill. This is useful for seasonal storage, as you point out, but again flattening the daily fluctuation is what's really necessary. The bigger value is for the use case that's not in as much demand.
The point of storage is that you can capture the surplus energy of renewables. The idea is that if my grid consumes 100 GW of electricity and I produce 150 GW during the day I can capture that extra 50 GW. Dams can't do this. Yes, you can reduce a dam's production when renewables are at peak generation and let water levels rise. But that's not really storage. What happens when the renewables produce so much energy that it's saturating demand? You can't capture that surplus energy with just a dam, you need a bidirectional connection.
Pointing out that you're sidestepping the fact that only a much smaller portion of storage capacity can by cycled daily like a lithium battery is not at all bad faith.
...which it can do for the full 2GW rated power without discharging water.
Every time load shifting or diurnal storage is mentioned, there are cries of 'but what abuurt the 3 day energy drought you need four days'
Now when presented with a system that is designed precisely for this use case you start whining.
Make up your mind.
> What happens when the renewables produce so much energy that it's saturating demand? You can't capture that surplus energy with just a dam, you need a bidirectional connection.
In addition to this you can use Tumut 2 as your output, then when there is surplus energy store it via snowy 2. This will take a few weeks, but it is a way to fill the entire 350GWh with curtailed renewable energy if that is what you really want. Some water is lost in a full emptying or when changing from diurnal capability to 5 day capability, but some water must go downstream anyway or blowering cannot work. The full 7 days can be cycled a few times a year, which is what it was built for.
Even without that, you've absorbed 2GW with your hydro curtailment and your 2GW storage facility is storing 2GW for a week exactly as advertised. Focusing on a technicality that doesn't come up is bad faith. You can't cycle 350GWh with 2GW in a day. Can you not divide?
You were the first one to bring up seasonal storage here [1]. Nobody was ever talking about seasonal storage until you brought it up. "but what abuurt the 3 day energy drought you need four days" this is all you talking, bud.
> In addition to this you can use Tumut 2 as your output, then when there is surplus energy store it via snowy 2. This will take a few weeks, but it is a way to fill the entire 350GWh with curtailed renewable energy if that is what you really want.
But it's not what we really want. What we really want is to capture the excess production of intermittent sources. Saying a dam is energy storage is like saying natural gas plants are energy storage. You can curtail their output when renewables are in production, sure: If you have 100 GW of demand and 50 GW of solar production during the day you can run your natural gas plants at 50 GW during the day and 100 GW at night. But what happens when solar grows to 200 GW? The objective is to use 100 GW and store 100 GW during the day and tap into the stored energy at night. Dams and natural gas don't let you do that.
It says 2000MW on the document you linked. It's not anyone else's fault if you can't be bothered comparing the numbers 2, 24 and 350.
> But it's not what we really want. What we really want is to capture the excess production of intermittent sources.
Think it through for even half a second. If Tumut 2 is operating at average, then the water it ejects over the course of days or weeks can be stored at any rate up to and including 2GW. In all practical scenarios (which do not include a week straight with nothing but draw followed by a week straight of nothing but charging) what you describe is exactly what snowy 2 does. In situations where the entire system doesn't need to produce net energy, diurnal draw cycles can feed water into Talbingo, and diurnal charge cycles can feed that water into Tantangara (and tantangara s higher so it can be a small jet energy draw). The water needs to be released anyway (but not in any particular week) for irrigation and to keep the river healthy so where is the problem?
If you lack the imagination or ability to apply logic necessary to see how three parts can fit together that's not on anyone else for not spoon feeding you the obvious conclusions available from the sources you cited.