[oskarkk]

> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?

Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.

[piva00]

HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.

[gehsty]

There are several lined up for construction over the next 5-10yrs (eastern green link 1-5)

[functional_dev]

Why 600km exactly?

[oskarkk]

600km is roughly the distance from the hilly parts of Scotland to the south of England.

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, the idea of people claiming that something on the Great Britain is too far and can't distribute power to something else on the Great Britain is laughable.

Next we'll have somebody from Lichtenstein saying the same about their country...

[oskarkk]

Well, I only said that if we're considering a ~fully renewable energy generation in the UK, with supply evened out by massive pumped storage projects, then locating all the storage in Scotland isn't ideal for the efficiency of the system. But yeah, I looked up the losses on HVDC lines, and it seems to be a non-issue (at least from a technical point of view). I also looked at a map of wind power[0] - seems concentrated on Scotland, so the distance from generation to potential storage would be quite short.

[0] https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-wind-power-t...