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by theshrike79 2637 days ago
There really aren't any of these in the scale we need, they're used even today to offset peak loads. And all of them still burn fossil fuels.

The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

1 comments

The reason peaking turbines use fossil fuels is the lack of a carbon tax sufficient to drive them to other inputs. In particular, they'd migrate to renewable hydrogen in a CO2-constrained situation.