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Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Wind, hydro, and storage. Pumped hydro has already existed for a long time for helping nuclear with load following https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd... and as battery prices fall and production ramps up, even battery based storage is likely to become feasible for grid-scale storage.

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Not every day is a windy day. Battery storage is ridiculously bad for the environment and wasteful. As mentioned, not a lot of hydro storage in Kansas.

Plus, when the hydro storage fails and floods a town, that’s still pretty bad.

Pumped hydro is very dependent on geography. Good luck doing pumped hydro in Kansas.

Sure. No solution is one size fits all. This particular solar installation happens to be in Colorado, very close to a lot of area where pumped hydro would be extremely cost effective.

Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective.

Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh

Pumped storage requires creating new lakes, destroying existing ecosystems.

And creating new ones. Why are the existing ones more valuable?

The entire point of pumped hydro is that you're constantly draining and replacing the water. The reservoir is not an ecosystem.

Another graphic: https://hydrosource.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/hmr...

I know "Kansas is flat" is a popular trope, but it's not even that accurate.

Depending on how you measure, lots of states are flatter than Kansas. Florida is the flattest state by nearly all measures. Illinois is crazy flat as well.

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