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by Const-me 1804 days ago
> why pumped storage is actually not going to work, or why we don't have more of it already

(1) Requires a lot of land. (2) It needs a height difference, at the required scale prohibitively expensive to make an artificial one. (3) Requires lots of water.
2 comments
elihu 1804 days ago
Something I've heard that's non-obvious is that pumped hydro doesn't work well unless the altitude change happens over a small-ish horizontal distance. It's no good to have a thousand feet of height difference if it happens over a hundred miles. (I'm not sure if this can be mitigated by making the pipes bigger to reduce drag, but I guess there must be a point beyond which it isn't really practical.)
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pfdietz 1804 days ago
PHES has been underestimated in the past because people looked only at existing waterways. Allowing PHES to be built off rivers radically expands its potential, to be orders of magnitude larger than necessary. There is still some geographical constraint, but transmission helps with that.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php

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