> Blocking water with a dam is a well understood problem
I feel like we still have some problems with dam building, because they keep failing. We struggle to get the building material (in particular, sand). Concrete is pretty awful in terms of CO2. Dams of all sizes cause problematic changes to the rivers they're on, and block flows of fish and other animals. Smaller low head weirs and dams kill humans.
Lots of time, money, and effort is going into removing smaller dams and low head weirs.
We won't need any storage. We'll just get all of our electricity from dams. Since it's a well understood problem we can build them anywhere we want in any quantity.
Nah, wind and solar are cheaper and safer and don't take as long. We can use the existing dams for dispatchable power though. As well as CSP of which the unsubsidized LCOE has recently hit parity with O&M of nuclear and is plummeting. Throw in some thermal storage as well, that's safe.
This is quite the tantrum to be having in response to being told that you don't need a nuclear reactor to pump water downhill. Was it really so earth shattering to your world view?
But you do need an alpine lake, with another body of water down below it to collect that water so it can be pumped back into the upper reservoir. The geography needed to built pumped storage is very specific. Simply saying that we can just build dozens of terawatt hours of pumped hydro is as nonsensical as saying we can just build more dams. Is that really so earth shattering to your world view?
I feel like we still have some problems with dam building, because they keep failing. We struggle to get the building material (in particular, sand). Concrete is pretty awful in terms of CO2. Dams of all sizes cause problematic changes to the rivers they're on, and block flows of fish and other animals. Smaller low head weirs and dams kill humans.
Lots of time, money, and effort is going into removing smaller dams and low head weirs.