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Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Power Project
I love this place. It is set in the beautiful countryside of the Catskills

Don't know where you think you got your information on where pump hydro can work; Lewiston is a pump hydro at Niagara Falls... if you've ever visited the Buffalo area that's where the midwest begins. It's flat. The topology needed could be found in probably every state in the country (about 200 feet of head). That reservoir is almost entirely a man made creation (earth berms).

Pump hydro needs 1.3 MWh for every 1 MWh returned to the grid later. That is true end to end efficiency. It's comparable to any battery in efficiency, but is several orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. We just LEM'd (life extension and maintenance) our pump hydro plant (16GWh delivered at 1.2GW) after 40 years in service at a cost of $135M.

http://www.nypa.gov/press/2010/100610a.html

Probably this plant was say $1.3Bn one time cost to build in 2012 dollars (based on Bath County being 50% bigger at $1.7Bn); I know we were about ~$100M in 1970. That's a one time cost... since we pump and gen we don't develop silting issues. We cost $11M to run annually, because we're a bureaucracy. We could be run full auto or at a much lower staff. Still, that's 16GWh at >$.001/Wh annually. This is why global capacity of pump hydro is increasingly quickly in areas with lots of renewables (the EU is adding about 30% more capacity by 2020).

But anyway, there's also molten salt Stirling engine solar, which can't ramp (because of heat constraints), and in effect can run all night... eliminating the need for any external storage.
http://inhabitat.com/nevadas-new-molten-salt-solar-plant-will-produce-power-long-after-the-sun-sets/

Thanks for the perspective on the GIS study. Looking again, I also see I might have not read this carefully enough:
    http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/25/technology/solar-new-york/
"If every one of those roofs had solar panels, when the sun shines the brightest the city could get half its electricity from solar power."

So, that would only be for peak hours (so, four hours a day or so, which is more in agreement with what you said). But in any case, cities usually have resource regions, like Jane Jacobs talks about, so there is no reason NYC can't just have a big solar farm upstate, same as it has watersheds there.

I also live in upstate NY, in a partially passive-solar house (it was a cabin in the Adirondacks that someone expanded with passive-solar additions).

The house has electric heat to avoid combustion because that was before air-to-air heat exchangers were understood, and electric heat is expensive, though still less than I used to pay for oil heat in a drafty place a decade ago. We should improve it more though. We could benefit a lot from solar thermal for hot water. Our house is on a slab though, not a basement, so our options are a bit more limited for upgrades. A heat pump might be a great investment, too. Also related on what is possible with much better design:
    "No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative 'Passive Houses'"
    http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace

I'm mostly a software developer (including some real-time embedded in the past) and also a writer, and I don't care for heights (even as my father would tell about scampering up a tall mast on a training ship as a young man to wave his hat to the queen of the Netherlands). So while I like all these changes, they end up being more hands-on than I am comfortable doing myself.

I have one emergency solar panel tucked away I have never put up permanently, for example, that I bought in the run-up to the Iraq war when I was unsure what reprisals there would be, just to be able to keep a laptop going if worst came to worst. About eight years later, that panel can probably now be bought for about half the cost.
    http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

The XPower 1500 portable battery/inverter device I bought to go with it for energy storage failed though and in a fairly short time, probably over a cheap charger that came with it failing and overcharging (causing the battery to vent sulfurous smelling gas so I did not trust it anymore), and so we paid to have it recycled (the shipping etc. costs to have it sent back to the factory for "repair" was pretty high).

But ultimately, we'd like a permanent system "just in case" and also to be more "green" (though that is debatable when you live near hydroelectric power). It looks like, even being on the grid, the costs are looking more and more attractive (with current subsidies, although if fossil fuels and nukes payed the true costs of pollution, health, defense, and risk up-front, renewables probably have been cheaper since the 1970s, so I don't feel bad about the subsidies).

I feel innovations in financing and the spread of trusted brands for doing these kind of improvements is going to have a big effect in getting more people to make changes. But we are not quite there yet. But we are very close. One of the reasons we've put off doing much about that is just the sense that costs keep dropping, so we wait for the next best thing.

Great to see NYPA is hiring -- something like "Lead Real Time Systems Engineer" is tempting for embedded software developers interested in energy issues, even ones with a fear of heights: :-)
    http://www.nypa.gov/careers/default.htm

The New York State Power Authority runs such a plant. Many years ago you used to be able to tour the whole thing (I have a photo somewhere of myself in front of one of the turbines) but I think nowadays you are limited to a visitors center.

That's a great energy storage scheme and would integrate well with nuclear for the base load. Fill the upper reservoir during off-peak hours from nuclear and drain it during peak hours to supply the demand over and beyond the base load. Now you've got an electricity supply that can meet both base and peak loads without resorting to carbon based sources to meet the peak demand (natural gas is the most popular fuel for this purpose right now).

I'm mystified by the "cheap hydro power from the Niagara River" part.

I believe that part had far more to do with their decision. Everything after that is just an extra description saying where it's from.

As for your claim of them "stealing" the power from other people:

The first phase will receive 10 megawatts of hydro-electric power from the New York Power Authority, which will also provision 15 megwawatts for the second phase of construction.

At the end of 2006, the New York Power Authority completed an upgrade to the Niagara power project. The station can now produce 2,400 megawatts. This study [pdf] puts the peak load at a little under 2.2 megawatts.

As you can see, there is plenty of power

I'm mystified by the "cheap hydro power from the Niagara River" part.

I believe that part had far more to do with their decision. Everything after that is just an extra description saying where it's from.

As for your claim of them "stealing" the power from other people:

The first phase will receive 10 megawatts of hydro-electric power from the New York Power Authority, which will also provision 15 megwawatts for the second phase of construction.

At the end of 2006, the New York Power Authority completed an upgrade to the Niagara power project. The station can now produce 2,400 megawatts. This study [pdf] puts the peak load at a little under 2.2 megawatts.

As you can see, there is plenty of power

Pumped hydroelectric is great where it's available, sure, but what would, say, New York City do? Pump out New Your Harbor?

No, they pump out a lake in the Catskill Mountains.

The big difference is that those greenhouse gases are already in circulation while burning fossil fuels takes carbon that has been locked up for millions of years and adds it back into the carbon cycle.

Decaying vegitation, burning trees, growing trees, none of these things actually change the amount of carbon in the environment, they just move around the carbon that's already there.

Which would be a decent point if I was making a hydro to coal comparison. But I was making a hydro to nuclear comparison. The last time I checked, nuclear doesn't release any carbon into the environment. And while your point about hydro being neutral CO2 is valid, forests do sequester carbon (slowly) over many years. Plants and animals die, some of them rot (carbon release), some of them get sequestered into sediment layers/peat bogs/etc (carbon removal). And what about the other environmental impacts of hydro schemes? What about the fact that most good sites in the West are already in use?

Don't get me wrong. My town has a municipal power company that receives more then 85% of our electric from public works Hydro projects. I release just ~15% of the CO2 that most people do every time I flip on a light. My electric costs about $0.05/kWh on average. I heat my friggen apartment with it due to the expensive cost of natural gas and the fact that my landlord is too cheap to upgrade my gas furnace which gets about 40% energy efficiency. I'm a big fan of hydro. I just don't see how it can be expanded on a large scale (in the West) and you can't deny the negative environmental effects.

"* for example pump water up a mountain to a storage lake and let it run down durring [sic] the night for power"

FYI: For those that think that this is just a random idea that networkBoy made up, http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/blengil.htm and http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/niagara.htm are examples of where this has been done for years.

"* for example pump water up a mountain to a storage lake and let it run down durring [sic] the night for power"

FYI: For those that think that this is just a random idea that networkBoy made up, http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/blengil.htm and http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/niagara.htm are examples of where this has been done for years.

I used to inline skate around Raccoon Mountain. The first time I ever got my brake smoking was a descent on that loop...

But I digress. Just wanted to say that Raccoon Mountain isn't unique, there are quite a few pumped storage facilities around the world. A quick search turns up Blenheim-Gilboa in the Catskills, Muddy Run in Pennsylvania, Bear Swamp in Massachusetts, Alta Mesa in Southern California... Lots and lots.

Touche. However, it isn't even "most". It's "some". And although a Canadian company DOES sell hydroelectric power to the U.S. there are American companies generating at the falls, too. Observe the Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Citation 1, from the Niagara Falls article:
The most powerful hydroelectric stations on the Niagara River nowadays are Sir Adam Beck 1 and 2 on the Canadian side, and the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant and the Lewiston Pump Generating Plant on the American side. All together, Niagara's generating stations can produce about 4.4 GW of power.

Wikipedia Citation 2, about the American-side power plants: ...the Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam (the source of the majority of New York City's electricity), also in Niagara Falls...

Citation 3, from the New York Power Authority, which owns/manages the power plants on the American side, WHICH FEED NEW YORK:
" The Niagara project, located about 4 1/2 miles downstream from the Falls, consists of two main facilities: the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, with 13 turbines, and the Lewiston Pump-Generating Plant, with 12 pump-turbines. In between the two plants is a forebay capable of holding 164 billion gallons of water; behind the Lewiston plant, a 1,900-acre reservoir holds additional supplies of this liquid fuel"
(http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/niagara.htm)

SO, you're completely off base. NO, we don't import most of the power for the Northeast from Canada. We generate it ourselves, using OUR OWN power plants on the Niagara river.

That's life, man. So there you have it.

Claiming that the Northeast gets most of its power from Canada is cute, and a fun spin on the truth, but it's not very accurate.

Maybe you could just use the excess energy to pump water uphill, and then let it run back downhill through a dam during the night.

Something like this? This is the Blenheim-Gilboa Pump Storage Facility, which has been serving New York State since the 60's.

. . . currently, our storage capacity for electricity is zero.

In Gilboa, NY, there is a plant with two reservoirs, one at the top and one at the bottom of a mountain. Four pump/turbines are connected between the two. It stores electricity using gravity, and has been there since the 60s, if I recall correctly. Details here.

Where do you live?! I pay less than 10% of that in the US. Have a Look ($0.0267/kwh if you don't want to bother RTFL)

At $0.29/kwh, it's cost effective to build your own cogeneration facility and sell power back to your local grid!!! At the very least, MOVE. You're getting screwed ROYALLY.

Some other NYS Power provider rates.. which are considered to be some of the highest in the US:

ConEd: $0.185/kwh

EnergyEast (NYSEG): $0.1267/kwh

NiMo: $0.1206/kwh

RG&E: $0.1151/kwh

data source here

-AC

Been on this one many times on school trips. You actually get to see a lot of cool stuff.