There are two incredibly common wrong assumptions made about pumped storage:
* It doesnt exist. Nobody says this outright of course but solar and wind skeptics often choose to "assume" that only more expensive lithium ion batteries can store power generated by solar or wind and "forget" about pumped hydro, being up to 3x cheaper.
* The geography for it is rare. The geography for hydroelectric dams which can also be used as pumped storage IS rare, because undammed dammable rivers are not common. However, for pumped storage it's not the case.
In both cases there are certain lobbies whom I think have a vested interest in perpetuating these false assumptions - the same way false assumptions about, say, wind turbines and bird deaths are perpetuated by people like Trump.
I toured the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant when I was a child, in the early 70s, over 50 years ago! It was built on land that is as flat as a pancake, with the only geographical convenience being easy access to Lake Michigan. I am impressed to note that the Wikipedia article lists it sixth in its list of the five largest pump-storage plants in the world.
Pumped hydro has been around for decades and was the goto solution for storing excess nuclear power in the sixties. So, there's a lot of it around. But it's barely growing. You can plonk down batteries just about anywhere. Engineering large water reservoirs for storing energy, is a bit more work; and not that cheap typically. And you do need the terrain to have some elevation differences. I.e. mountains.
But, after reading the article, it seems that Trump's assumptions about bird killings were true?
Apparently US windmills kill hundreds of thousands of birds every year. Among them hundreds of bald eagles. So over time that adds up to thousands.
Now you have this little factoid, then what? Should we ban everything that kills more birds than wind turbines? Context-free facts like this with clear implications are akin to lying.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm a strong proponent of wind energy.
But I also like birds. In my view of the world, we should search for solutions that let windmills kill less birds.
The fact that it was Trump who brought this up doesn't make it less true. At least not in my world.
The falsehood here is that only wind mills kill animals. Coal mines, especially strip and mountain removal mines kill plenty of wildlife. Oil refineries also do, as do turbines in hydro dams. There's no energy source we have that is zero impact.
I've always felt it implied when this is discussed, but you are correct that it was not mentioned above. Wind turbines kill birds so wind farms are bad. But the alternative isn't that we just don't use less electricity. And Wind farms may kill more bald eagles than coal mines, but as a resident of an area where coal was king, I would disagree if anyone said they are less harmful overall.
There is a term for this type of comparison but it is escaping me right now.
I've read it more that "wind farms are not an unalloyed good", which counters something I do read.
In generaly, this example seems pretty weak. Trump might've exaggerated the number of this particular type of bird being killed, but by far more he massively underplayed the numbers of the total number of birds being killed by them. Seems as though people are reading a lot into this, when you could more easily read the opposite into it: Trump downplaying damage to non-bald eagles! Why!?
Yes, "wind farms are not an unalloyed good" seems like a great summary of the famously reasonable Donald Trump's take on Wind power, a subject he's kind of ambivalent about, but just wants a reasonable discussion of the facts with all context taken into account. And to immediately stop all offshore wind on day one of his potential next presidency.
> They say the noise causes cancer.
> If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations: Your house just went down 75% in value.
> The windmills are driving the whales crazy
> They shake, causing worms to come out of the soil. This is not a joke
> windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.
> If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill, because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery. We put a little statue for the poor birds.
Threw in a little bonus Putin quote there, see if you can spot it.
I think it's rather the other way round. People who want to promote solar energy want to make it look as if the high volatility of this energy source can be simply solved with pumped storage, allegedly making it possible to get rid of coal and fission power plants, as well as natural gas power plants and biomass power plants etc. To this end they compare the cost of pumped storage merely to battery storage, which makes anything else look cheap. (Because batteries are so expensive.)
>I think it's rather the other way round. People who want to promote solar energy want to make it look as if the high volatility of this energy source can be simply solved with pumped storage
It can be solved with pumped storage and batteries:
>To this end they compare the cost of pumped storage merely to battery storage, which makes anything else look cheap.
The cost of batteries, pumped storage and windgas do not compare favorably to natural gas.
They compared very favorably to nuclear power though. Nuclear power's costs eclipses the cost of solar and wind even when it is backed by windgas (which is more expensive than either):
Thank you for the link. I noticed a huge pro-nuclear sentiment in several places, Reddit, Lemmy, and sometimes here. It is an interesting energy source, but it has huge drawbacks compared to other energy sources. The price/time to build and operating costs are significant. Most current reactors need to be heavily subsidized with taxes to be competitive. Plus, of course, the waste challenge.
> Nuclear power's costs eclipses the cost of solar and wind even when it is backed by windgas
This article is an edited version of a 'Wind power as an alternative to nuclear power from Hinkley Point C: A cost comparison', a report by Marie-Louise Heddrich, Thorsten Lenck and Carlos Perez Linkenheil, all of Energy Brainpool, commissioned by Greenpeace Energy. The evidence it furnishes is expected to be used as part of the legal case against HPC forthcoming in the European Court of Justice.
Having skimmed the report I am not happy with the arguments within.
Is 60% efficiency for CCGTs in variable generation following mode realistic? 65% peak is possible in new CCGTs, by running continuously to keep the steam generating cycle going, however observed gas plant efficiency in the UK is just shy of 48% per DUKES data. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electricity-chapter...
Is 71% efficiency of conversion from electricity to gas what is seen in industrial scale windgas installations? Are there many hundreds of MW windgas installations in 2024?
Where is the carbon coming from to turn into methane? Is there some sort of carbon capture going on (and shouldn't this be costed in)?
How much transmission build-out is required to support an additional 11.2GW of wind? How much does this cost given the low utilisation? Even if the electricity to gas plants are located within the wind farm, 11.2GW represents many square kilometers of land.
It is assumed that the methane network and storage are already there. The economics of storing the gas (also whether the gas can be taken out of the system at the same price and priority it is put in) is not addressed.
The study compares the price that will be paid for HPC power (including risk etc) with the cost of the components of the windgas system which is not the same as a company proposing and building the whole system (preparation, financing, risk etc).
Realistically we are comparing several stable energy sources here that can all be combined with highly volatile energy sources like solar and wind: Coal power, nuclear power, natural gas power, pumped-storage hydropower, power-to-gas [1], and batteries.
That is a biased comparison. Solar energy is infinitely expensive during the night (which is hardly "extremely cheap"), so you can only realistically compare it in combination with stable energy sources, like power plants or pumped-storage power. You have not shown that nuclear power and solar power are more expensive than pumped-storage hydropower and solar power.
>Solar energy is infinitely expensive during the night (which is hardly "extremely cheap"), so you can only realistically compare it in combination with stable energy sources, like power plants or pumped-storage power.
Yeah, or another more expensive form of storage windgas, which I did.
Never heard the term windgas before, very catchy. I wonder how cheap renewable electricy must be before it starts making economic sense going from water --> gasoline.
* It doesnt exist. Nobody says this outright of course but solar and wind skeptics often choose to "assume" that only more expensive lithium ion batteries can store power generated by solar or wind and "forget" about pumped hydro, being up to 3x cheaper.
* The geography for it is rare. The geography for hydroelectric dams which can also be used as pumped storage IS rare, because undammed dammable rivers are not common. However, for pumped storage it's not the case.
In both cases there are certain lobbies whom I think have a vested interest in perpetuating these false assumptions - the same way false assumptions about, say, wind turbines and bird deaths are perpetuated by people like Trump.