Do you have any recommendations on how to learn more about this?
My brother has a steep hill on his property and Ive been wondering about the feasibility of PSH. How high the tank should be, the equipment, the power output.
You could start by just calculating the potential energy of the volume of the tank you are considering, and the difference in elevation between the reservoirs (volume x 1 kg/L x gravity x elevation difference, plug in the units of your choice and let google figure it out).
I suspect the amount of energy is far less than you are imagining... It takes a lot of water to generate a useful amount of energy. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66YRCjkxIcg) does an interesting demo and points out that a 5 gallon bucket on a ladder has the same potential energy as a watch battery.
It at least gets you all the right words to start googling for turbine options which helped me to do some back of the envelope math. It's a steeper hill than seemed feasible to me.
Thid has reminded me of this gentleman who has been using gravity fed old washing machines as turbines for electricity generation on his property for 16 years https://youtu.be/Xb6TIWub6KU
He doesn't need the pumped storage part of the equation due to a natural water flow, but it is part of the solution at least.
I suspect the amount of energy is far less than you are imagining... It takes a lot of water to generate a useful amount of energy. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66YRCjkxIcg) does an interesting demo and points out that a 5 gallon bucket on a ladder has the same potential energy as a watch battery.