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Comment by derekkraan | Hacker News Reader

Just for fun I looked up what the plans are in the Netherlands (17 million residents), where I live. Governments all over the world are going to start installing these grid-scale batteries in the coming years, because without them we can't really transition to renewables.

Anyways, the Dutch govt has allocated 400 million EUR [1] and expects to get 160MW - 380 MW installed for this amount (so 1-2x this battery plant in Hawaii). But the national network operator is reducing connection fees and hopes to trigger 2-5GW of new battery capacity by 2030. That's quite massive.

Expect similar new installations pretty much everywhere.

[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/09/netherlands-allocates...

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There are other types of storage than batteries: flywheels, pumped water storage, etc., and each has a time frame where they are competitive. I’m assuming that with 400M EUR, there’s room for all sorts of short-range and long-range options.

I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.

Pumped hydro is really great at scale, and it's a shame we don't build more of it. But it needs at least a substantial hill, with the ability to build a reservoir at the top and at the bottom (ideally just a natural lake at the bottom). The Netherlands is a uniquely bad place for them due to being famously flat.

Hawaii on the other hand could probably do some really effective pumped hydro plants. I wonder why the have so many battery installations instead?

Aside from being flat we also lack space, we live with the water so it needs space to flow into places that are not populated. This means large swaths of land are dedicated to what is essentially overflow capacity. Perhaps there is some energy that could be extracted in the process, but it makes it very hard for it to be a reliable backup.

It is in fact possible to benefit from pumped hydro even if you have no significant height differences in a certain area. How? By creating a basin inside of an existing body of water and emptying/filling when there's over/under supply of electricity.

I remember reading a couple of years ago that there were plans to construct such a "valmeer" inside of the Ijsselmeer, but I can't find much about it now so no idea whether it's been canned or not.

>Pumped hydro is really great at scale

What's your citation on this? I've spoken to a few civil engineers on this topic and they just laugh and say people that promoting pumped hydro haven't done the math and do not realize the size/scale of the mechanisms that they are proposing, and that they are thus not at all feasible.

I don't think you can just say "pumped hydro is really great at scale" sans evidence.

I think that any claim required evidence and pumped storage is included.

We visited the "Power Vista" near Niagara falls (US side) where they have 13 turbines driven off the water that would otherwise fall over a cliff. What I did not previously know was that the facility includes pumped storage. There is a reservoir above the generator turbines that they can pump water into from the supply of water that would normally drive the turbines. I questioned the staff about this - particularly if it fit into the expansion of solar and wind. I don;t understand the answers I got.

* The station used to be base loaded but no longer is. That makes no sense to me unless they have to restrict flow to maintain a minimum flow over the falls.

* They don't use the pumped storage to store energy from other renewables (including the power station itself.) They will draw it down during the summer months to maintain the minimum flow over the falls.

It was interesting to see but I wonder why they don't run base loaded or make more use of the pumped storage. NB, I'm not an expert WRT generation of distributing load and I may not have been talking to the right people.

The scale is small compared to the area available in some places.

Example: a planned 8 GWh pumped hydro facility in Ely, Nevada. It's tiny compared to the landscape around it.

https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/

There is an idea for a reverse reservoir: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Lievense

Make a dike ring in eg. the north sea, pump water out of the ring into the rest of the North Sea to store power, and vice versa to get it back. Easy peasy...

Funnily enough next to wind also solar is one of the major renewable sources in the Netherlands. So also day-night storage would be important.

The Netherlands actually is second place in terms of solar generation per capita in the world (only Australia has more).

Too bad the source doesn’t say it either. Is that 160-380 MWh of energy storage or 160-380 MW of peak output power?

It’s probably the former.

For 400 million EUR you can buy ~300 Tesla Megapacks 2XL which together give ~300 MW of output power and ~1.2 GWh capacity.

Yup - batteries are also getting fast tracked in the TSO connection queue in NL. Lots of good news for Tesla and other battery manufacturers.

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