[oblio]

How applicable is this to large scale electricity storage? I don't have any numbers but I doubt you could power a large economy like the German one based on pumped-storage.

It's ok for some niche use cases but I doubt it's the future.

[myself248]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

...can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt and has a storage capacity of around 9.1 GWh.

[oblio]

I've just checked and Germany produced 516TWh of electricity in 2019. So that would mean that you need how many? 50000+ of these?

[myself248]

Lazy troll is lazy. You don't need to store your entirely yearly production. You need to store the difference between your daily production peak and your daily demand peak, and you only need to store it for that fraction of the day.

Try harder, please.

[Someone]

“You need to store the difference between your daily production peak and your daily demand peak”

Firstly, I would think the difference between production and demand on a single day is a better indicator than the difference between your daily production peak and your daily demand peak, which could be months away from the day production peaks.

Even that isn’t correct, though. Such a reserve buffer would be depleted after that worst-case day, so if the day after that day also has demand outstrip production, you’re in trouble.

[imtringued]

You know, we have these things called gas plants... They burn gas and you can turn them off if you don't need them... You can even generate the gas with excess renewables if you really want to...

[shuntress]

If your goal is to store 100% of all power produced for an entire year for use a later date, then yeah... you would need 50,000+ of those.

If your goal is something not ridiculous, for example, storing storing the difference of production-consumption when production>consumption for use later when consumption>production, you would likely need very significantly less than 50,000+ of those.

[oblio]

My point is that these need very specific conditions to actually work and you need a lot of them.

For your average country even having 100 is difficult. Think of some flat place like Poland.

More than that, Germany isn't even the biggest producer/consumer of electricity... Imagine some place like China trying to ramp this up.

[grey-area]

No.

Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks.

There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.

[oblio]

The only example that I know of is Norway which is kind of the holy grail of hydro, in general:

1. Small population.

2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.)

3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels.

4. Very rich country.

5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure.

Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?

[grey-area]

The UK has had pumped storage since 1963, there are more planned around the world - this is neither exotic nor particularly hard, the only constraint is land, and as I mentioned there are multiple other solutions.

Scotland has already entirely met its needs with renewables this year. This can and will be expanded to other nations in time.

[myself248]

Oh, just a few oddballs nobody's ever heard of: Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Japan, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Belgium, Ukraine, South Korea, Poland, France, Australia, Thailand, Germany, UK, India, US, China, Russia.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

[coryrc]

That's power, not energy.

[7952]

It is very useful as a way of providing backup for large generators that can fail instantaneously. Like a nuclear plant or a HVDC link.

Although, at some point it could be easier to just build coastal lagoons and let the tide do the work.