[Schroedingersat]

> What I am saying about pumped hydro is that it is deeply mature technology, with no surprises in store. All the equipment is essentially unchanged for decades, except for control-system electronics. All that is new is reservoirs not fed by watersheds.

And I can attach a washing machine motor to my water tank. If it produces basically nothing and costs double the alternative, it's not relevant to the discussion.

> There are actually dozens of shallow reservoirs behind earthen dams way high up in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, many almost a century old, constructed with bulldozers that used pulleys instead of hydraulics, hauled up there on fantastically bad cart-track roads. The reservoirs feed penstocks down to Pelton wheels thousands of feet below. For storage, they just attached pumps to the penstocks to push water back up.

So there are no new projects which not destroying an ecosystem that are on cost parity with batteries then?

Also as an aside, how pathetic is capitalism as an organizational system that we can't achieve the types of things that were done with horses and carts and pulley bulldozers in the past?