When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
In technical terms, could you lay out what’s the difference? You’ve got a water retention system that empties into a generator and a capability to pump some of the water back upstream. What larger storages and generators do we have besides dams? None, and there’s no topographic feature that could be at an advantage there. Because the problem at hand is one of scale: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~USA
Assuming that energy demand remains the same (instead of increasing, which we know will be the case with more electrification), and that, to keep targetting those 4000TWh produced, we replace coal and gas by wind and solar. That would mean having to store what amounts to 2000TWh of production (under an extremely optimistic assumption of 80% storage capacity for the replaced energy only). That would mean that, just to buffer out what solar+wind require in storage, we would have to surpass what current hydro produces, 8 times over.
I know this isn’t accurate (storage ≠ production, grid can be balanced out geographically, etc), but we are one order of magnitude in trouble already.
There is no upstream, you’re thinking it’s a dam but you don’t dam up a stream. You have two containers at different elevations to store potential energy.
You’re conflating a lot of things in this second paragraph. The world can generate enough solar for the entire planet off an area the size of new mexico. LA can power itself off just covering parking lots toe power itself. Then there’s nuclear, wind, tidal… All of these need a buffer because they struggle with either inconsistent production or inconsistent demand. Pumped hydro’s only purpose is to be that buffer. When you’re making lots of electricity you move mass up and when you’re needing more than you can produce you move mass down.
The US can power itself for the next 100 year off waste nuclear weapons alone… but nuclear wants to sit at a flat load. Because of this, you’d need brownouts to shed demand. Pumped hydro means you can run more nuclear and generate more electricity than the grid needs at night or whatever and pump water up a tube to another container.
Basically, the reason we use natural gas to generate power is because it is cheaper than anything and can be stopped/started with much less fuss. LNG tanks are pretty cheap, it comes from the ground at a determined rate… it’s super convenient.
But a LiFePo battery system with inverters and solar is enough to power households if done efficiently for less than $50,000. The price gets lower every year and eventually people will be able to opt out of the grid entirely.
I mean, you don’t answer the billion dollar question here. Let’s not call it a dam, but a container, and let’s not mention the need to pump anything. The amount of (potential) energy you can store is a function of the volume of the above container, isn’t it? Then, could you estimate the amount of water this container would need to be able to retain in a scenario where the grid relies primarily on intermittent energy sources? And can you propose an engineering solution to contain this much amount of water?
The intuition here is that you are re-inventing dams, without the room to build more.
I don’t agree nor disagree with the rest of what you say, I just can’t get beyond the “energy storage is a solved problem” point yet.
No. The potential energy is determined by elevation difference and mass.
That depends on each individual site of pumped hydro. Obviously a site with a 1000m drop will need less water in containment but enough to fill the pipes.
Yes
It’s not a reinvented dam because dams can only be built where there is a gorge and a drop. For instance you can’t really dam the Mississippi. You also can’t dam mostly every mountain but you can build a container on a mountain and fill it with any mass.
It’s hard to agree or disagree on anything if you think potential energy is a dam. Is a truck with water in it just a dam that turns water mass into thermal energy with it’s brakes to you?
That’s correct, those are Joules in SI. Now if you turn this mass into mass per second by introducing the flow of water through the dam, you get the power (Watts) produced through the release.
But here we are talking about energy storage (Watt.hours), which is, for how long will you be able to sustain emptying your container while delivering the desired power. And obviously this is a function of how large the container is because eventually you will run out of water no matter the elevation difference.
So, now that we are back 3 messages up thread
To help you out with the scale, again, your example from earlier (Bath county) has a storage capacity of only 24GWh, annual hydro production of the USA is 256TWh. Bath county has a reservoir of 34•10⁶m³, Oahe dam has 29•10⁹m³.
Anyway, this is a good tool to keep an eye on this “solved problem”, and relate to how the world is dealing with it, independently from the regulatory dissatisfaction you mentioned: https://sandia.gov/ess-ssl/gesdb/public/
And this paper goes neatly through the variables at play and why oversimplifications are not helpful: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1076830/full
I really don’t understand the obsession here in comparing energy storage to energy production.
Do damns produce electricity with the sun? No. Do they produce electricity with the wind? No. They produce electricity via the rain.
The storage of electricity doesn’t have to meet energy consumption because that is what solar/wind/nuclear is for. The point of the storage is to form a buffer.
The first comment I posted shows how if you had 100 the size of the bath county plant you could run the entire US for hours. In just 100 of them. For the cost of the F35 it could be 300 or more but I am accounting for nothing but problems.
Your source even agrees with me.
The absolute biggest problem with pumped hydro is that it costs a lot of money. Like, it makes nuclear look cheap.
What’s 24gWh*11769?
It is a solved problem. The solution is just extremely difficult and expensive.
why, in your opinion, is this more an obsession than “pulling power cables” and “tugging floating wind turbines”? This is very much part of the grid transitioning towards more intermittent (and renewable) energy sources. We can’t just keep putting wind and sun without offsetting the intermittence (since we are also removing carbon-heavy sources), which means either adding low CO₂ base-load (nuclear), but we are not going there fast enough, or adding more storage (and neither there do we have a solution).
It’s funny, because my link https://sandia.gov/ess-ssl/gesdb/public/ shows that there are 1693 such projects in the world, with 739 by the USA. China, with a more important landmass and not bothered by F35s (or whatever) doesn’t even cross the 100 threshold. So the onus of the proof is on you to demonstrate that we can actually build hundred more pumped storages in the USA for it to make a difference.
This isn’t even contentious. What is, is that you believe that we have this silver bullet of pumped hydro to cover our upcoming energy storage needs. And that’s not nearly the case.
Which was my point all along
I don’t want to argue about semantics. If the solution is too costly to be implemented, then it’s not a solution. I don’t think there’s more to be said here.
Yes you do. That’s been your argument this entire time. You kicked around all this time till now saying really weird things like how batteries are inefficient or that green hydrogen is from hydrolysis but then tell me what your point is all along when your point has been wrong from the start.
I proposed using 1.7 trillion dollars in funding in my first comment and now you’re arguing that I wasn’t discussing cost from the start? Is 1.7 trillion dollars not costly to you? Is the project being two times over budget not costly? Is it further not costly that even being twice over budget nearly half are completed? Now is the time you pearl clutch about cost?
You don’t engage in pedantry, you engage in belligerence.
Let’s keep this simple. It all started with your affirmation that energy storage is a solved problem. When I asked how you would go about implementing the solution, you brought-up pumped hydro. And we ended-up with enough data pointing towards this problem being all but solved (cost is one aspect that you are quick to dismiss, but engineering/practicality is a major one).
In all, we agree, we are in the same boat, we want more budget being allocated for the energy transition. But where we diverge I that I don’t see how turning a complex problem into a caricature (bordering a conspiracy theory) helps anyone. The physical world we live in doesn’t care about opinions, and isn’t affected by digital money. You don’t have to believe a random stranger on the internet (who happens to work in this field), if this is your crusade, there should be people near you, academics, scientists, engineers, who would be pleased to educate you on the subject. This is pedant, I don’t see where’s the belligerence.