Can Hoover Dam Become a Giant $3B Battery? (cleantechnica.com)

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wants to spend $3 billion to pump back the water that's flowing through Hoover Dam -- so it can flow through again later, during periods of peak energy demand. This generates a net profit for the dam's operators -- the pumping stations are powered by cheap solar and wind energy, while the dams are currently operating at just 20% of their capacity. An anonymous reader quotes Clean Technica: The problem is that California has so much renewable energy available now, thanks in large measure to aggressive state mandated policies, that much of it is "constrained." That's utility industry speak for having to give it away or simply let it go to waste. In some cases, utilities in California actually pay other utility companies to take the excess electricity off their hands.

Why not store it all in some of Elon Musk's grid scale batteries? Simply put, pumped hydroelectric storage is cheaper than battery storage, at least for now. Lazard, the financial advisory and asset management firm, estimates utility scale lithium-ion batteries cost 26 cents per kilowatt-hour compared with 15 cents for pumped hydro storage. "Hoover Dam is ideal for this," Kelly Sanders, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California tells the New York Times. "It's a gigantic plant. We don't have anything on the horizon as far as batteries of that magnitude."

Comments

Re:If you have mountains and 100sq miles to destro

[fermion]

This reminds me of the argument against windmills in the Appalachia because the scenic destruction of the wind farms is greater than the scenic destruction and water contamination of mountain removal mining.

Ot the argument against being a vegetarian since organic vegetables are more expensive than chik fil e

None of this occurs in a vacuum, and one can't win an argument by saying a new solution is going to be destructive, unless the current solution is 100% non destructive, which nothing is because entropy is real and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

So what we are saying here is that this is a solution that can provide the required 24x7 electrical flow, even when the sun is not shine or the wind is not blowing, without the costs associated with fossil fuels. Furthermore, unlike a traditional power plant, it is easy to regulate the power output to meet the demands of the moment and not have to run excess capacity and waste resources.

But of coursed the irrational reactive luddites who are afraid of change and are unable to learn the new skills needed for a new technological world just pretend that mountains are not already being destroyed, and the air is not already being polluted beyond what is healthy. I will remind people of one fact. Much of California is in a unique geological structure that prevent the polluted air from being diluted quickly with clean air. This means that they are unique in being intolerant to excess pollution. As the feds insist that California can no longer regulate it's pollutants we are going to see the air quality and health situation decrease dramatically.