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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."
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."
Hoover Dam wasn't originally intended to produce power, it was for water management, such as flood control, supplying LA with a consistent water supply, and irrigation. Power was added later. I would guess pumped storage would have to balance the water management needs so it's not like you can just raise the water level and keep it there.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
In Europe, by the swiss, using surplus cheap nuclear power to pump water back in their dam and providing peak power at a premium when needed.
Sounds like due to renewables there is at times extra power that can be stored (by pumping water uphill.) You also need excess water to be pumped uphill. Does California also have this excess water? When you consider the value of the water, does it still make economic sense to put it back behind the dam? I don't know the answer or have an opinion on this, but I do keep hearing about water shortages in California, so it makes me wonder.
"That's one dam expensive battery."
I'll go home now.
Use the waste heat from bitcoin mining to boil the ocean. the covection will carry water up into the hills providing rain to prevent fires and the ground water will end up in lake mead where it can be used to make electricity to power the mining systems
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They got the cost right, but it's a cost for capacity not a cost added on to each KWh delivered.
If the water comes from the dam in the first place, wouldn't it be more efficient simply to leave it there until needed?
They can't without damaging downstream ecosystems. A certain amount of water must be released continuously.
This wasn't an issue back when the dam was constructed. However in the intervening decades more and more water is being used by upstream customers along with greater environmental regulation requiring the dam to release water for downstream ecosystems. The end result is not enough water coming into the reservoir to keep water levels as high as they'd like.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When looking at something of this scale, you can't use today's prices. I found several estimates of the rate of decline of cost in battery storage over the next few years and even the conservative ones put it at 70% of today's prices in 5 years. Since pumped storage is a very mature technology, it is unlikely to experience any decline.
The 15 vs 26 cent comparison in the article amounts to pumped storage being roughly 60% of the cost of battery storage right now. So, in roughly 7 years, the two should cross. And that doesn't take into account the likelihood of big advancements in utility scale flow battery storage which is likely going to replace lithium because it is not an application that cares about density or weight of the battery system so much as cost.
The likelihood of a project of this magnitude gaining all of its approvals and being completed in 7 years is slim to none.
This is just an attempt to slip some more billions into the old-money major construction industry.
It would be better to build much smaller scale projects with batteries placed closer to demand points. They would start coming online much sooner and each year the new projects can adapt to the latest, most cost-effective technologies. If you spread that same $3 billion over 15 years of battery buildout, the cost of the ones you're building near the end will be much less than that 15 cent per kWH mark and balance out the cost of today's expenditures. In addition, you'll be providing service within the first year. Mega projects always get eaten up by increased costs due to delays. A battery approach actually ends up having a decreased cost with delays.
Build a second dam.
It's dams . . .
. . . all the way down.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If I pump it up twice as far it costs twice as much energy to pump it up, but I get twice as much when it comes tumbling back down.
Is there something I missed here, something that doesn't scale linearly?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is there something I missed here?
Yes. The power generation uses the potential difference between the level of Lake Mead, and the level of the outlet. If it then flows downhill for an additional 20 miles, no power is generated from that.
There's an excess of energy according to TFS and TFA. So what exactly are we wasting here?
What's wasted is the capacity to use that energy later, when it's needed.
Los Angeles has a chronic problem of a shortage of power production in the summer, when the sun is high and winds are low. They might have an excess of power in the morning with all that solar power but unless people want to cool their houses and buildings to freezing and then still have them get unbearably hot in the afternoon this will continue to be a problem.
Here's what I propose as an alternate solution, and I accept that this may be unfeasible. I propose California build desalination plants along the shore to use that excess power. This will address their water shortages as well. The energy storage aspect comes in pumping desalinated water to the Hoover Dam, this addresses a water shortage problem downstream of the Hoover Dam. While they are at it maybe they can dump some of that water in the Rio Grande. So much water is taken from the Rio Grande that there are times the river no longer reaches the ocean, or the flow reverses and salt water invades the ecosystem. There's already a tunnel connecting the Colorado river to the Rio Grande but I do not know how much water can and does flow through it.
There's my proposal, don't build a pipe from a downstream location and pump water up to Lake Mead to get electricity storage for LA. Have LA pump the energy to the lake in the form of desalinated water. LA gets water, those downstream of the Hoover Dam get water, and LA still gets the electricity storage they need.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Except wind and solar are orders of magnitude cheaper and easier in every way than nuclear, but other than that yeah you're right.
Orders of magnitude? Citation needed. Here's mine:
https://www.instituteforenergy...
On shore wind, nuclear, and coal are all about the same cost, within the error bars of each other. Solar is expensive, and needs storage to follow load, making it cost even more. Wind also needs storage but if coupled with natural gas (the cheapest means we have to produce electricity right now), coal, and nuclear then it's a viable energy source. Assuming the goal is reducing CO2 then we'll rule out coal, leaving nuclear (a tiny fraction of CO2 compared to coal) and natural gas (about half the CO2 of coal), as backup for the wind. But, as the article points out, the problem with wind is the lack of storage. Here's the solution...
Fuel is storage.
With a mix of wind, nuclear, and natural gas we can get energy that is inexpensive, low CO2, and reliable. This means that states like California would have to start building new nuclear power plants and natural gas burning power plants to go along with the wind power. Sure, California is a sunny place so maybe they have locations where solar is as cheap as the rest so go with it if it makes sense.
The problem is storage and California has been destroying their storage capacity with the shutting down of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Stop doing that and the problem disappears.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You leave out of the equation building high voltage DC transmission lines to move the electricity to distant markets.
If you do that while still keeping the subsidies for windmills to produce power, even when that power isn't needed, then those power lines just export the problems of subsidies to other states.
California is just one pile of mismanagement on top of more mismanagement. They created this shortage of storage with an abundance of wind and solar subsidies. Stop subsidizing this and the problem will resolve itself.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
All you do is you orient the solar panels such that they produce the most power when the power is needed most. Problem solved with solar and with no need for nuclear, once again.
Citation needed.
I've seen the data and power is needed most shortly before sunset, when orienting your solar panels does nothing. Unless you are "orienting" your panels about 1000 miles off shore it's not helpful.
Not cost effective, just like nuclear power.
Citation needed.
I see that California has several desalination plants already, with plans for many more. I admit that pumping the water to another state could be more trouble than it's worth but building desalination plants is worth the trouble otherwise they would not be building them now, and if they build up reservoirs for the fresh water (which I'm sure that they already have) then they should be able to "tank up" fresh water when energy is cheap and stop desalination when it's expensive.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The problem is... where's the lower reservoir? The Colorado River isn't going to run backwards for you.
The whole lower Colorado below Hoover Dam is a stairstep of lakes behind smaller dams. The idea in TFA was to use the lakes behind Parker and Davis as the lower reservoirs to implement pumped storage behind Hoover. I maintain this would not be necessary if we used the fluctuating energy to desalinate on the Pacific coast, serving local cities.
Every drop of Colorado River water is allocated to downstream users, with the last muddy trickle being used by Mexico. Since the partition treaties and dam construction, none of it reaches the sea. Any water no longer needed by Los Angeles and San Diego would be purchased by other users under the same set of treaties.
I've got a Chevy Citation that I'm going to use to run your stupid face over with. Go to wikipedo if you want.
I did go to Wikipedia, that's how I found the citation I gave in my previous post. I'm curious how you came to believe nuclear to be orders of magnitude more expensive than wind and solar. I must have missed what you saw on Wikipedia. Help me out and point to where you found what you believe you found.
You really are a useless cunt aren't you.
That may also be true, but I'd like a citation on that as well.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As does California, several, some of which it has had for a long time. For instance: The San Luis reservoir / O'Neil Forebay complex.
San Luis reservoir was completed in 1967 and has a capacity of just over 2 million acre-feet, about 319 feet above the forebay. The forebay is at the level of the local section of the California State Water and Central Valley Projects, while the reservoir is filled by pumping and generates power when water is released. It serves both as water storage for irrigation and city drinking, and as a pumped-water energy storage facility.
For decades many ares of the US had to go to expensive peaking generation and variable electric rates while California did not: The power requirements for pumping irrigation water are enormous, but the time of day of the pumping is not critical. So California electric utilities and the water projects just arranged for the pumping to be varied by time of day to level the load on the electric grid. But the wide deployment of air conditioning and solar and wind power seem to have disrupted that.
That last is somewhat surprising, actually, Solar + wind generation tends to level the daily peaking and HVAC requirements, including compensating for weather variations. (More sun = more air conditioning load and more solar generation. More wind = more HVAC load due to lowered effectiveness of insulation and more wind generation.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way