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by mnw21cam 473 days ago
Pumped hydro is a form of gravity battery. It doesn't have great energy density, but it has fantastic power density and responsiveness. That's where its strength lies. We have also probably already built most of the ones that could possibly be built.
1 comments

Closed loop pumped hydro can be built anywhere there's a hill, there's tons of available expansion capacity there
There are 86 large pumped storage sites in the world. It does work, but you need the right geography. You need two good reservoir sites at considerably different levels close to one another. That's somewhat hard to find.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-pumped-hydro

David Roberts

Yeah, we have a lot of hills. And that's it. So, other than that, you could plop one of these down almost anywhere.

Erik Steimle

That's correct, yeah. You need some proximity, obviously, to transmission and load.