Pump It Up When You Don't Really Need It: Pumped Hydro, Future of Energy Storage

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Visit brilliant.org/Engineeringwith... to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription.
Electricity storage is such a hot topic these days! There seems to be no end to the variety of new and old technologies being developed. Using, sand, concrete blocks, radioactive diamonds, and of course the big one: lithium ion batteries. But did you know that over 90% of current electricity storage is from a much less trendy storage technology? Pumped hydro is an energy storage solution that’s been around for over 100 years, but is in my opinion set for a resurgence in coming years as we need to add long duration energy storage to support electricity grids with large proportions of variable renewables.
Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
01:43 The current electricity storage landscape - How much is there and how much do we need?
02:52 What is Pumped Hydro and how does it work?
04:45 Looking at Pumped Hydro vs Lithium Ion Batteries
05:37 Challenges that slows down pumped hydro development
05:44 Problem #1 - Financial
06:45 Problem #2 - Construction Duration
07:56 Problem #3 - Suitable Locations
09:08 New approaches to pumped hydro - Off-River and Modular
10:40 Is it actually difficult to find a suitable location for pumped hydro? - Global pumped hydro atlas
13:26 Why isn't pumped hydro as popular as lithium-ion batteries?
13:54 Pumped hydro projects to keep an eye out for
15:40 Summary and Rosie's thoughts
15:58 Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video!
A huge thank you to Andrew Blakers from the Australian National University for the information he shared with me and feedback on an early script draft!
The title of this video was suggested by one of the Engineering with Rosie Patreon team. I was really struggling to think of a clickable yet accurate title, and Peter stepped up to the challenge! Big thanks to Peter and the others who suggested other good titles.
If you would like to help develop the Engineering with Rosie channel, you could consider joining the Patreon community, where there is a chat community (and Patreon-only Discord server) about topics covered in the videos and suggestions for future videos and production quality improvements. / engineeringwithrosie
Sources:
CNESA - Electricity Storage Market
en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2020/...
IHA - Pumped Hydro
www.hydropower.org/
Our World in Data - Global Energy Consumption and Generation
ourworldindata.org/energy-pro...
PV Magazine - Energy Storage for Zero-Carbon Future
www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/2...
IEA - Energy Storage
www.iea.org/reports/energy-st...
BNEF - Battery Storage Capacity
www.edie.net/bnef-global-batt...
Greentech Media - Price of Li-ion vs Pumped Hydro
www.greentechmedia.com/articl...
RE100 Group ANU - Global Pumped Hydro Atlas
re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Our World in Data - Electricity Mix
ourworldindata.org/electricit...
This video was sponsored by Brilliant

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2 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 359

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Visit brilliant.org/EngineeringwithRosie/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription.

@Conservator. Год назад

Hi Rosie, That 300,000 times the worlds current total (2:48), is that just the current grid connected li-ion capacity or does that include car batteries? Assuming it’s not including car batteries, how much could car batteries contribute to short term energy storage to the grid? I’m surprised that V2G isn’t developing much faster. (I’ve seen your excellent video on it).

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

@@Conservator. it just includes grid batteries. It might be nearly time for another V2G video looking at how things are going globally.

@andrewjames4617 Год назад

One thing not mentioned is the option to use seawater pumped hydro, with the lower reservoir being the ocean. There is the Cultana project in South Australia as an example.

@ehombane Год назад

@@andrewjames4617 yes, I thought at this too, since water shortage is happening a lot. but I never saw this idea mentioned. Norwegia could sacrifice a fjord and surely have more storage than needed. but I assume they they are already almost green anyway, so they do not need too much to add. and also. what I forgot was flooding of houses near waterfront, and those could be quite plenty. but the idea of offriver location did not occurred to me that can be so sufficient. however I was aware of the option of flooding those regions under the sea level. huge projects considered since a century ago. but too big to be profitable fast enough for the greed driven financing. Also, salt water may add costs, since salt ruins equipment quite fast.

@Dr.Gehrig Год назад

Rosie : do you know if many of these sites are coastal? Despite the added cost involved in dealing with saltwater it seems to me that using the ocean as your low reservoir and then having an artificial saltwater pond/lake at a nearby point of higher elevation would be a pretty solid way to do pumped hydro. Are projects like this done or common?

@simonclark8290 Год назад

Electric Mountain in Wales has been running since 1984. It can contribute a maximum power of 1.73GW to the UK grid and has a storage capacity of around 9.1 GWh. It pumps the water up to the top at night when electricity is cheap and let's it run back down during the day in high demand. From memory they can turn around from pumping up to generating in just 20 seconds. They make the most money by being able to respond quickly to dynamic load changes during this phase of operation. It was really worth a visit to see the giant pumps inside the mountain.

@nigels.6051 Год назад

Electric Mountain is no longer used as it was where it stored spare coal power overnight and released it at peak times. The big midday peak has disappeared, filled by solar, so it is only being used for hour to hour storage to cover short peaks, and for that it is seeing serious competition from lithium batteries which can be located where they are needed and can respond in milliseconds. Most of the UK hydropower now comes from Norway, where although it is stored hydro, it is not pumped, the reservoirs fill up in the winter and empty as needed. We do send a fair amount back, but it is used by Norway to avoid them emptying their reservoirs, so for us it is a store, just one without a pump.

@simonclark8290 Год назад

@@nigels.6051 I don't know where you get your information from (probably the Internet) but I've just spoken to them and it is still very much in operation. They have shut down the visitor centre whilst they undergo midlife safety improvements but I can assure you it it running today and it has nothing to do with coal. Maybe you're thinking of a differernt Electric mountain ;-)

@ncammann Год назад

Britain's Largest Battery A MASSIVE Lake in Wales | Fully Charged ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-McByJeX2evM.html

@rogeryoung6261 Год назад

@@simonclark8290 But the pumping function is powered by coal?

@RichRich1955 Год назад

@@rogeryoung6261 they wrote formerly by coal. Like a pump storage near me formerly operated by nuclear power but that npp no longer exists so grid power is used.

@ysasso Год назад

Great video Rosie. My employer is operating the 240MW Shoalhaven pumped hydro facility near Kangaroo Valley NSW, the geography really lends itself to it. Although it doesn't compare with the Snowy Mountains scheme in scale, it still is one of the most interesting places I ever had the chance to visit!

@vdivanov Год назад

Please do more reviews and discussions on hydro, including small-scale! There are systems now in operation for over a century, since the dawn of electric service. We need a better familiarity and greater acceptance. Thanks!

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Thanks for your support and yes, I plan to do some videos on specific pumped hydro projects! I prefer to wait until the physical works have been begun (or completed) so I have something to show and confidence things are actually happening. So for now, Snowy Hydro 2.0 is on the cards, then maybe next year some smaller scale projects.

@tarstarkusz 11 месяцев назад

@@EngineeringwithRosie Bring on Tom Murphy to discuss it. Tom wrote a long article on the Do The Math blog under the title "Pump up the Storage" It absolute fantasy. There isn't enough available suitable land.

@hg2. Месяц назад

CO2 is a ruse. Climate change the "Greens" are talking about is caused by changes in the cosmic-rays/solar-activity relationship and cloud formation (See the work of Henrik Svensmark.) Cloud formation by actual cosmic rays can be scene with the naked eye in Cloud Chamber demonstrations. RU-vid has dozens of videos about them....

@cadekachelmeier7251 Год назад

I had heard that we already basically built all the good pumped hydro sites. I'm happy to hear that that info was probably just about the traditional systems and there's actually a lot more room to grow with it. I ran the numbers a while back curious how a pumped hydro system would work in a single family home. You'd basically need to have the entire attic and basement filled with water reservoirs to compare to a lithium ion battery.

@TCt83067695 Год назад

One lithium battery? What was the capacity of said battery?

@hawkesworth1712 Год назад

Pumped hydro in a home. You're joking right?

@cadekachelmeier7251 Год назад

@@TCt83067695 like a Powerwall. All the numbers had big enough variation to choose from, so take it as within an order of magnitude or so.

@cadekachelmeier7251 Год назад

@@hawkesworth1712 not that I thought it would actually work. Just looking at numbers to get a sense of scale. The elevator shaft with a cubic meter of lead is the obvious choice for home storage anyway. /s

@TCt83067695 Год назад

@@cadekachelmeier7251thanks. I must say I'm still very surprised by this. A Powerwall is about 13kWh in capacity. Yet if I put 2 external tanks outside the house imitating basement and attic height, that's also equivalent to only 13kWh? I'm very surprised. Maybe we SHOULD fill up the tanks with lead or mercury then, like suggested.

@tonystanley5337 Год назад

Didn't realise pumped hydro had so much scalability. BTW interconnects also reduce storage requirements. Solar energy arrives pretty consistently but gets converted to wind chaotically, capturing it over a wider area abates local shortages. Smart grid, demand shaping, home thermal storage can also help.

@hitreset0291 Год назад

Good comment. We do not have a renewable energy production problem. We do have a renewable enery storage problem. This is where our efforts need to be pushed harder.

@shantanusharma8695 Год назад

Great video...Pumped Storage is the future of Energy Storage industry. World Largest Pumped Storage Project is under progress in India at Andhra Pradesh State and I am part of this project.👍👍👍

@NaumRusomarov Год назад

My 2c. Look at Sweden, norway, Finland and Denmark for combining traditional thermal and renewables (wind and solar) with hydro. we might not have many pumped hydro resources, but we have a lot of traditional hydro that’s already working. Maybe also Australia. Seems like we’re gonna be one of the first to transition to fully renewable grids.

@henningventer2917 Год назад

South Africa have 3. 1.Tugela system of 1 GW in operation since 1982. 2.Palmietfontein 400MW in operation since 1988 and Ingula 1GW in operation since 2017. The constrain is the availability of water in South Africa as nearly 50% of it is semi desert.

@wyldrushorchard1061 Год назад

every day's a school day, did not know pumped hydro could be used off river!

@tommclean7410 Год назад

Nicely done! Thanks for restoring my faith in the promise of pumped hydro storage.

@TedApelt Год назад

The United States has a lot of hydro storage already built that is going unused. For example, the total generating capacity of the Grand Coulee Dam is 6,809 megawatts and its average annual energy output is about 2,300 megawatts. The total generating capacity of the Hoover Dam is 2,080 megawatts and its average annual energy output is about 478 megawatts. By using solar and wind to pump water upstream to those two dams, we could increase their output by as much as 6,111 megawatts, with months of storage. The same is true for many other hydroelectric dams.

@philiphawe4773 Год назад

Rosie, et al. New Zealand is studying Lake Onslow, in Otago, an off river location with possible 750m head. Initial estimate is around $4Billion. A 12km tail race (or whatever you call it) will be required.

@geoffreyplatt9251 Год назад

Lake Onslow could provide 5TWh of storage, or 6 months of power generation.

@oliverwilson11 7 месяцев назад

Initial estimate was $4B, most recent estimate was $16B. Still very cheap per MWh. Unfortunately the newly elected government has just cancelled work on it. It will still likely need to be built at some point. New Zealand's power system is going to remain hydro-dominated so the risk of dry years causing energy shortages isn't going to go away. So the delay caused by this government ideologically cancelling the investigation into it (shortly before the investigation would have been completed) is unfortunate.

@reinerjung1613 Год назад

As always a really good video. Your work helps a lot in supporting our local efforts in informing people on what is possible and what the pros and cons on different technologies are. While we do also some of our own research, as we have to do this in our free time, it is very helpful that we can rely on other that have investigated the topic already. Thanks a lot. Of course I am sending everyone I know to your channel. ;)

@lonnymo Год назад

Very well researched Rosie! I am very interested in forms of energy storage. Thanks for covering!

@tombh74 Год назад

An excellent video as always! Have you had a look at aquifer pumped hydro? The advantage is that you dont need terrain elevation. If you have two suitable aquifers at different level (with a good aquitard in between) you can even avoid having storage on the surface. Potentially you could have an energy storage system under a city.

@ronaldgarrison8478 Месяц назад

In balancing the Grid, the easiest way to use pumped hydro is to use what Nature has already pumped up. If you have a large reservoir behind a dam, you can draw it down when more power is needed, and block it more when demand is less. Once you set out to pump it up actively, that has to be much more expensive. BTW gravity batteries have some of the same problem: You have to build a large structure to get the storage capacity, whereas a natural reservoir is already provided for you. The upside is that you can put it where you want it, at any scale.

@lint2023 Год назад

Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant is a pumped-storage hydroelectric underground power station in Marion County, just west of Chattanooga in the U.S. state of Tennessee. The facility is owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Construction was started in 1970 and was completed in 1978. summer net dependable capacity of 1,616 megawatts

@chrisdardis4794 Год назад

Thanks for the explainer Rosie!

@charlie2640 Год назад

I suspect that another factor in the placement of any large reservoir is how porous the underlying material is. You don’t want all that stored energy to just leek away.

@Froggability Год назад

Yup, thousands of tonnes of clay

@BenMitro Год назад

Thanks Rosie. That research clearly shows the way forward for energy storage is pumped hydro. I imagine pumped sea water can also be exploited, though the environmental and corrosion issues may prove quite expensive. I did a quick "back of the envelope" calculation and worked out that if all cars in the world were electric and they supported V2G we would have, on tap 75TWh of battery storage - a long way from the 10,000TWh estimated required capacity, but it is a storage that is local to the grid so implementation costs are minimal. As the number of EV's go up, storage increases too. V2G seems to get little coverage and our Governments seem to be ignorant of the potential.

@StephenLydiate Год назад

The Electric Mountain in Wales is used as an energy storage, it gets it power from the Grid, which is becoming more and more Wind power generated energy, as we transition more towards renewables sites like this will be needed more as with renewables storage is key to making it viable, as the wind doesnt always blow, the sun doesnt always shine and the sea is sometimes flat, but with enough storage like that, we can keep the grid topped up during those periods, it also would mean we could keep the wind farms spinning in high wind, and not worry about overloading as, those sites could use that extra energy up storing it as potential futre energy.

@brianjonker510 Год назад

Here is an idea for a video. A just for fun video....or zany depending on how you look at it. Use Lake Erie as a upper reservoir and Lake Ontario as the lower reservoir. A few centimeters in lake Erie is a trillion liters of water with 50 + meters difference in height.

@brianjonker510 7 месяцев назад

Updates?

@manuelkusce9447 Год назад

Very interesting and informative. Thank you!!

@mikemellor759 11 месяцев назад

Helpful description of the technology - thanks

@andrew_tomes Год назад

New Zealand is slowly progressing the Lake Onslow project which is projected at 5TWh @ $4 billion

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Really? That's humungous. I'm surprised I didn't come across it in my research, but I'll look it up.

@rogeryoung6261 Год назад

@@EngineeringwithRosie Prof Andrew Blakers current cost of greenfield Pumped Hydro is AUD 150,000 per mwh. (= AUD 150 billion per Twh). So that 5 Twh scheme would cost AUD 750 billion, not AUD 4 billion.

@jrsubs Год назад

That's 5TWh of annual total generation and storage, not the capacity of the upper reservoir. Which I think makes it roughly the same ballpark as Snowy 2.

@rogeryoung6261 Год назад

@@jrsubs Ok, fair enough. So the assumption might that the system will fill and discharge 15 times per year. (Every 3.5 weeks on average). So the $750 billion becomes a $50 billion equivalent. BTW I see that Snowy2 has blown out to an estimated $10 billion. That’s very cheap for a pumped hydro system. (Because the two reservoirs were already built).

@Froggability Год назад

Yes it will be 25000 times the grunt of the SA battery,

@colinkeizer7353 Год назад

We might also see more baseline power from deep geothermal, accessed via new plasma drilling technology. There are a few test sites this year which might tell us whether the drilling technology works quickly and reliably. Then we'll need to see whether traditional geothermal heat exchangers, turbines and well fluid recharge cycling, function as needed.

@markrowland1366 Год назад

Great presentation Aussie.

@francesconicoletti2547 Год назад

The Shoalhaven Pumped Hydro in the Southern Highlands of NSW ( a few km from where I live ) doesn’t appear to be run of river , it uses the Southern highlands escarpment to provide the head between the two storages and the water appears to flow through pipes in the escarpment. It was built in 1977. Presumably as a peaker for the coal fired power stations. I think you will find that especially with global warming and especially in places like Australia, water is not free. It might be part of some rort , and appear cheaper to some people then it should otherwise be, but there is an opportunity cost to where the water goes.

@jrsubs Год назад

Very clear headed video (as always) and good intro to pumped hydro. As a great fan of PSH in general and Snowy 2.0 in particular (hang the cost and fingers crossed re environmental consequences!) I hope you do get to examine Snowy2 in some detail. In the process a discussion on system sizing and comparing PSH system 'capacities' would be very useful. Many comments here and elsewhere show a confusion between every possible usage of the word 'capacity' and there is much misunderstanding about the relative sizes and capabilities of PSH projects. Journalists routinely confuse power and energy (GW and GWh) and there is a separate confusion between energy storage capacity when expressed in GWh and annual energy production/usage, also in GWh (see discussion of Lake Onslow below, the not-actually-5TWh project). It would be useful if discussions would standardise on using hours of operation at full power as the measure of "size" of a project, but that is hardly ever quoted. In fact it is quite difficult to find any measure of energy storage capacity for most projects, something I discovered when trying to assess where Snowy2 stands in relation to other projects. As far as I can see, Snowy2 is bigger (in terms of energy storage, 350 GWh) than any other project ever built or planned. Is this true? Comparing capabilities is made even harder when you take into account sometimes large differentials between upper and lower reservoir capacities, so that some systems may have large energy storage that can not be recharged because the lower reservoir is small. In any case, the fact that Snowy2 is able to generate for 175 hours at 2GW puts it way ahead of most (all?) other PSH projects. If you've started your research you might have seen that they named the most recent of Snowy2's tunnel boring machines "Florence", after Florence Violet Mackenzie, generally credited as being Australia's first female electrical engineer.

@anthonyboland Год назад

Great channel Rosie.👍

@zen1647 Год назад

Great video. I never knew the head could be as little as 100m. That's great to know. Pump it, pump it!

@AJ-et3vf Год назад

Awesome video. Thank you

@PCRoss2469 Год назад

Great video thanks !

@matthewhuszarik4173 Год назад

What every hydrogenation facility needs to look at the ability to convert themselves to pumped storage as well. This could probably add a significant amount of pumped storage. Another potential huge source of storage is BEV. Most of them are sitting home in the garage during the biggest energy demand mismatches. If they could be tapped to pick up that load and then recharge later in the evening it could also provide an immense amount of critical storage.

@drigans2065 Год назад

When I worked for the CEGB (UK national generating board) back in the 1980s one of the parameters of the Dinorwig pumped hydro station was the minimum emptying level of each reservoir which if I recall correctly depended on species that lived in the reservoirs. Also the amount of water varied due to lack of rain. The system wasn't closed (there's leakage).

@patdbean 10 месяцев назад

What about using the sea as the bottom lake?

@drigans2065 10 месяцев назад

@@patdbeanIt wasn't close to the sea. But the top lake would still limit the amount it could be emptied for species protection there.

@patdbean 10 месяцев назад

@@drigans2065 yes, you would still need a top lake, and if it did not already exist you would have to dig it Also the pumping equipment would have to be salt water hardened.

@wayned3375 Год назад

Whichever storage you choose sand being the best you need medium sized grids with say 50 homes and local shops covered in solar panels charging the sand battery’s up ready for all the kettles going on at 5:30 6:30 when people are home from work paired with vehicle to grid power rather than relying on generators will help grids in this way would help reduce mass power cuts

@automotivetales Год назад

I’ve always been fascinated by pumped hydro - the Welsh had a great system with a pumped hydro linked to a Magnox nuclear plant - worked so well with a stable baseload from nuclear and demand fluctuation from the pumped hydro back in the 70s! Look up Trawsfynydd nuclear and Dinorwig and Ffestiniog hydro 👍🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

@Nikomarii Год назад

Just did a report on this last week!

@ricardomartins1783 Год назад

New 1.1 GW Pumped Hydro has been inaugurated this month in Europe, one of the largest in the last decades. (Tâmega Giga)

@rickrinke1443 Год назад

Love your channel! Could you do a video on burning plastic for energy creation?

@philipyoung7034 Год назад

I am a little surprised that you didn't mention Niagara Falls. The Adam Beck (1958) and Robert Moses (1961) reservoirs are also effectively off-river pumped storage as their crests are higher than the surface of the source waters, which is Lake Erie.

@jimgraham6722 Год назад

Thanks Rosie. In my view the issue is not so much about domestic or even transport demands for electrical energy. These are relatively easily dealt with, and if grid goes down and lights go out it will be very inconvenient but no real problems. The real issue is about industrial use. Steel, aluminium smelting, cement, bricks, fertilizer, transport fuel, industrial chemicals and so on. A lot of these are currently powered by substantial inputs of coal, oil and gas and require continuous intense (hot) energy inputs. To fully electrify the country, Australia has to plan for at least 60GW of continuous energy use by 2050. The former Chief Scientist has suggested the actual requirement if we replace current energy exports could be ten times higher. Snowy Hydro 2 provides around 350GWhr storage at the 2GW rate. All this depends of course on surplus power to pump the system up, and most critically in a country plagued by drought, adequate water to pump (think millenium drought). By my estimate Australia will need storage at least ten (3500GWhr) and possibly twenty times the capacity of Snowy Hydro 2 to assure the country's economic future using renewables alone. If this requirement cant be met it will lead to a substantial decline in living standards given projected population growth (35m@2050) and the need for increased energy to cope with climate change (particularly cooling and desalination). If there were to be a nuclear mix, using Gen 4 high temperature small modular reactors, the energy storage requirement could be substantially reduced. Needless to say in my view nuclear has to be part of the mix, probably around 10 * 2GW nuclear power stations delivering 20GW. The other 40GW would be delivered by renewables backed by storage. People will argue the cost. I suggest the nuclear power stations be paid for in whole or part by cancelling the nuclear submarines. $9bn per power station might just about do it. Our strategic position will be greatly strengthened by an assured energy supply in a way nuclear submarines could never do.

@davieb8216 Год назад

My intuition wants to agree with you without doing any figures myself... but this is a figures problem. It's not a matter of cost of nuclear power vs costs of a submarine but costs of nuclear per gwh (assume only producing when not needed) vs the costs of batteries per gwh. I don't think these costs came close with the latest CSIRO gen cost report. That may mean 10 more snowy hydros and a bunch more batteries. But if that come out cheaper than nuclear they will probably go with it. Especially considering any politician who tries to push nuclear will get destroyed.

@davieb8216 Год назад

Plus the actual costs of purchasing excess energy with batteries I suppose.

@davieb8216 Год назад

Aluminium smelters and other industries may need to become more flexible to reduce that 60gw figure. They can already reduce their required power by 30% not sure if your figures accounted for those sort of variations.

@jimgraham6722 Год назад

@@davieb8216 You can turn these industries off, but they will be inclined to move to wherever they can get continuous power. This means countries like Indonesia and China. Ultimately this will mean a diminished living standard as living standards are directly linked to energy use. If you can sell that to Australians thats fine. Personally I go with the 60% of the electorate who are happy with nuclear power. Its interesting to me that there has not been the slightest protest over nuclear submarines using highly enriched fuel based in Sydney, Brisbane. This suggests there is no opposition to nuclear power at all.

@davieb8216 Год назад

@@jimgraham6722 maybe the cost benifit would still be there for most industrys if the off peak price was cheap enough to out weigh the higher peak prices. This would only work of the overall system was cheaper though. One things that I think is going to be a drain on a renewable grid more that their figures show is electric vehicles, I can't see every workplace having enough charging stations that vehicles will be charging in off peak and discharging during peak. I didn't know Nuclear support was that high at the moment (probably depends on the question asked). I was talking to a pro nuclear independent (unsuccessful) and she said that in the past, who ever went pro nuclear would get the media onslaught after them. Maybe since Murdoch has decided to be pro nuclear the libs can push it. Despite what Adam Bandt says, I think it is a debate worth having but there aren't many mature ones around it.

@brettdunstone Год назад

Thanks Rosie. I'm baffled by why there hasn't been more pumped hydro systems developed. Seems like a no brainer to me but seems like many governments (like mine here in South Australia) seem to be fixated on hydrogen as a solution rather than supporting pumped hydro.

@davieb8216 Год назад

People can see a potential market to export hydro overseas, so the private sector pushes it. There would be a high barrier to entry for that sort of market as well. That's my feeling anyway.

@brettdunstone Год назад

@@davieb8216 Agreed. Hydrogen is the trendy market. But I think our governments should be supporting technology that is fit for purpose, rather than what is trendy or what the gas industry wants. Pumped hydro is a much more efficient store of electricity than hydrogen, which is what it is being spruiked as here in SA

@fishyerik Год назад

Greenwashed fossil hydrogen is the big hope for the fossil fuel industry, as people want to believe that's a solution, with some CCS and or officially to "complement" green hydrogen production. The lobbying is probably massive.

@davieb8216 Год назад

I'm not familiar with what SA has been pushing tech wise. Depends how much they are pushing it and how many many dollars they are promising in the future. Ignoring it completely is not a good idea at this stage, when they may only need to offer a small subsidies because they private sector is willing to invest a lot. Private sector in their head is thinking green hydrogen equals LPG with an ESG price tag.

@davieb8216 Год назад

I think our governments are somewhat supporting pumped hydro, based snowy hydro river project and the latest CSIRO gen cost report (I'll have to check the number but it did include an increase of hydro power).

@jamesdubben3687 Год назад

If these artificial reservoir systems are paired with floating solar, I think it's a real winner. Bonus of in a high evaporation location.

@UnpepperedAngus Год назад

Yeah, I have a hard time seeing lithium ion continuing to be used for large scale grid storage. I think the demand for energy storage, which has a high mass and volume energy density, will be much greater in the transportation sector. So I can see pumped hydro growing more than people think.

@klaudelu18 Год назад

Yes, please 😇 - 14:51 - "I may do a video on just that project, because I think it's an interesting one to talk about; local versus global environmental trade offs"

@teiguepayne1959 9 месяцев назад

A very good video! I would like to ask: any potential for installing pumped hydro schemes in worked out (non-open pit) mines? For instance, South Africa has many worked out deep level gold mines with shafts which are a few km deep. Any potential for using that existing drop of pumped storage - especially as South Africa has excellent solar potential?

@jasonogren5135 Год назад

I suggest that we redirect a bit of the hot air on RU-vid to turn the worlds generators

@Willhardwood Год назад

Very interesting to see all the potential sites. If you do an episode on snowy 2.0 I would like to know if it’s possible to return some environmental flow to the snowy river and make up the difference with pumped water.

@CraigFryer Год назад

No. While PHS is largely a closed loop system and would potentially displace some traditional hydro generation with stored wind or solar, the allocation of water resources down stream wouldn't be changed. Hydro is simply a byproduct of the water discharge to down stream users.

@st-ex8506 Год назад

Rosie! IYO, would it be possible, in flatter countries (Belgium, UK, ....) to use decommissioned underground mines as the lower reservoir of a pump hydro system, and a surface natural or artificial lake as the upper one?

@Marqui91 11 месяцев назад

These are fantastic, informational videos, do you have any videos on nuclear energy?

@alanhat5252 Год назад

9:17 & 11:20 this reminds me of Electric Mountain (Dinorwig) in Wales.

@alexwood5425 Год назад

There's a lot more hydro on mainland Oz than the snowy scheme, Kiewa, Dartmouth, Eildon, Rubicon, Ord, Shoalhaven, Brown Mtn, Barron Falls, Keepit. Then there's Tas with nearly 10 Twh compared to snowies 4Twh.

@bimblinghill Год назад

Given the lack of suitable locations near population centres in the UK, maybe tidal lagoons would help. These can have a pumped component. The head is very low, but the volume can be enormous. There are proposals for these along the Bristol channel and South Wales coast. They can also form part of flood defences.

@oliverwilson11 7 месяцев назад

Everywhere in the UK is near a population centre (by electricity grid standards), the UK is tiny and densely populated

@ksairman Год назад

Thanks!

@hg2. Месяц назад

@mariakaraboeva2908 Год назад

You are amazing ❤️

@grahamstevenson1740 11 месяцев назад

Pumped hydro is excellent generally although it's end-to-end efficiency can be rather low (70%) but the primary problem is still poor energy density. Compared to the 100s or 1000s of TWh (Terawatt-hours) of storage we would ideally need, current pumped hydro in the UK provides only GWh, 1000 times less that what we require for a transition to renewables. A 1000x expansion isn't really doable ! Remember that you need to store more than just a few hours or days worth of energy to cope with the variability of renewables. FYI, I looked at potential future sites in the UK for pumped hydro and there aren't many sites with the elevations you'd like. The UK is too hilly rather than mountainous.

@Justifi3r09 Год назад

Hi Rosie, please do a video on global verse local environmental trade offs for energy projects!

@trueriver1950 Год назад

I wrote about the original Snowy River hydro scheme in a school geography exam in the UK around the end of the sixties. You mean my answer is already out of date now after only 50 years or so?

@PinataOblongata Год назад

Just because it seems no one in the comments seems to have mentioned it, I thought I would come back and let you know I appreciate a good Elvis Costello reference

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

A couple of others did, but it seems not everyone is as big a fan as you and I 🙂

@SuperJLTube Год назад

Where can we find the map for possible pumped hydro sites? I saw two dots on your map near to where I live.

@jdaglish2975 Год назад

University of NSW, Rob Blakers, did a world wide first look at places that pumped hydro storage PHS could potentially be installed : www.nationalmap.gov.au/#share=s-py9ofDCNEwqsrfGGkptS5dJ9wSq

@user-rq2do4wg1b 4 месяца назад

Good video, definately correct conclusion regarding problems with lithium batteries, however the ANU finding regarding the scalability of PHES is wrong. Still definately potential to be a massive chunk of energy storage requirements. Also worth noting difficulties utilising VRE to power PHES systems. Actually nuclear and PHES systems are great friends and would probably be the lowest cost and scalable system available. However you're correct it would require longer term investment rather than knee jerk shortermism.

@Nikoo033 Год назад

Do you think that with the higher frequency and longer duration of annual droughts as we are experiencing in Europe could maybe hamper/reduce the efficiency of such storage systems? Would the more chaotic and random rains be sufficient to replenish the levels of water stored but reduced by droughts?

@wjhann4836 Год назад

"Off river" - there was the idea of developing a kind of of river storage in the western part of Germany. "kind of" because it was supposed to sit at an existing reservoir that already used for energy production. But the reservoir ist some 10km long. A lot of recreational activities around. BUT: it was intended to store a lot of energy and the water level of the reservoir should vary some +-2m. So all the recreational industry insisted.

@christianlollmann9537 Год назад

Nant de Drance in Switzerland is working since August 2022 . P: 90 MW Kapazität 20 Millionen kWh. The Swiss power Bank.

@pgantioch8362 Год назад

As I understand it, there are anoxic areas at the bottoms of the lakes/reservoirs used in hydropower (pumped or not). Bacteria living there can produce methane, which has its own climate risks. Did you research this? Are there ways to limit this in standing water?

@catandtheostrich Год назад

Nice Elvis Costello reference! :)

@yankabilly1963 Год назад

You can do it on the cost using salt water have the the solar pump the water up hill to a pond/ dam and open and use the generators to at night then refill again in the morning

@michaeljames5936 11 месяцев назад

I don't know if those sites, included any pumped-seawater hydro.There are absolutely incredible sites for this here in Ireland. Maybe a video on this topic, please?

@Scubongo 2 месяца назад

Could we use old abandoned coalmines that are close to a river for pumped hydro? For power, you let the river run down a pipe with a generator. And when you have excess energy, you pump the water back out. Same deal, but the reservoir will be hidden underground.

@absolute___zero Год назад

I am not an expert in the field, but I have the intuition that gravity storage will always be superior to hydro, because when water falls, some of it moves (lower) between the blades of the turbine, therefore part of the mass of the water doesnt produce any work, making it a loss. But with gravity storage the mass is not liquid, and it can't flow trough blades, so 100% of the mass going down will make some work. That's the reason pumped hydro will never be more efficient than gravity storage. Of course, I didn't prove it with math, but it seems logical, so no proof seems necessary.

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Hydro turbines are about 90% efficient, so your intuition is not correct about the size of losses there. The round trip efficiency for pumped hydro is about 80%, similar to what most non-hydro gravity storage is aiming for. One big difference is that pumped hydro has decades of operational data to arrive at that number, whereas non-hydro gravity storage systems have at best protoype validations, and we don't yet know what losses they'll have from maintenance and other downtime in the long term. With engineering we need to not only prove it with maths as a first step, but then also prove it works that way in reality because mundane things like maintenance make a big difference in many cases.

@iareid8255 Год назад

Absolute Zero, the very big and important difference is that hydro is controllable, gravity is not. There needs to be control when feeding a grid to make up for a shorfall of conventional generation or sudden increase in demand.

@CitiesForTheFuture2030 Год назад

In a changing climate, how much will water variability impact pumped-hydro systems especially in water-stressed countries? This did make me wonder: what about a marine pumped=hydro systems... pumping sea water to a reservoir when energy demand is now, and pumping it back out to see when energy is required? This, in conjunction with other new marine-based energy generation & storage tech. Other interesting hydro energy options include: - conduit hydro (mini turbines located inside high-flow water pipes) - turbulent hydro (constructed mini whirlpools) - mini hydro (mini hydro rotars in river & streams) On a different note: there are a few battery storage options in the pipeline that may be better-suited to grid-sized energy storage including liquid metal batteries. The future of energy generation is interconnected distributed mini grids + storage located nearer to consumers using whatever geo-physical assets an area has, ie community energy. Base tech would include conduit hydro, energy from poop (a free daily renewable commodity) via a no. of tech options, and waste to energy (must be clean). All urban areas pump water to homes, and remove household waste (minus recyclables etc) & sewage so why not use these for energy generation? Solar panels on building roofs would also feature prominently. in this context, energy efficiency is crucial to reduce energy demand.

@andrewradford3953 Год назад

Clever play on Elvis Costello. What are your thoughts on cross continent HV DC from the East Coast of Australia to WA and vice versa?

@nigels.6051 Год назад

HVDC from east to west and back would give you access to an extra 2 hours 20 minutes of sunshine each day, that would pay for a lot of the cable cost, even without the other benefits...

@tomjandrews5334 Месяц назад

Is the pumped part of pumped hyrdo necessary? Would it not be better just to reduce the amount of water flow when other solutions could substitute (solar during the day and wind when available) and increase the flow and power generated over night and when there is a lack of wind?

@francesconicoletti2547 Год назад

Could you do a video on the prospects of non lithium large scale battery storage, sodium, molten metal, iron, redox, and so forth ? They seem to me want to compete with hydro , but as lithium keeps falling in price they cannot get a toe hold in the market to start to scale up to the volumes that the theoretical economies of scale, which might drive there costs well below lithium, kick in. Or perhaps they are all vapourware.

@chiaracoetzee 7 месяцев назад

I had a question about pumped hydro sites: I've seen quite a bit of discussion of using old decommissioned mines for pumped hydro, where old mineshafts and caverns act as the lower reservoir and the surface acts as the upper reservoir. This has the advantage that the access shafts can be repurposed for pumping equipment. Could this expand the sites available?

@haveaseatplease 7 месяцев назад

Indeed, these decommissioned mine sites are looked into as an alternative for the more classic pumped hydro sites. But the old mine sites carry a number of disadvantages with them, an unstable excavated underground being the most important.

@RazorSkinned86 Год назад

I keep wondering why in areas like the US west where they are having aridification (permanent drought conditions) resulting in the countries massive network of hydroelectric dams no longer able to run at full capacity... well... why they don't retrofit those hydroelectric dams to function as pumped hydro energy storage during periods of the day? The dams already have an upper reservoir and because of flood risk the area directly below the dam is open land where the river can be widened into another smaller lake that can be used to draw water from to pump back to the upper reservoir. The hydro electric dams would still be able to operate as a normal hydro electric power plant during part of the day but during other parts of the day it would be able to pump water back up to the reservoir.

@PhilGregoryFX 10 месяцев назад

I had to turn up my volume because I could not hear Rosie speak. Then about 1:40 into the video this extremely loud 'intro' music blew the hell out of my speakers and woke the house up. I wish content creators would learn the art of balancing their sound levels, it would definitely improve the experience of the user/viewer/consumer. So glad I was not wearing headphones at the time, else my ear drums would be ruptured! Where there's blame there's a claim ;-)

@markthomasson5077 Год назад

How about micro pumped hydro schemes? Just wondering if any have been done. Even, say building a house with a big tank on the roof.

@Leopold5100 Год назад

excellent

@joaopaulopina843 3 месяца назад

As far as I understood I loved your lecture, Rosie! Absolutely! And I look forward to listen more from you. However you speak a little fast and you mention a lot of interesting concepts... would you be so kind to slow a bit down, please? Thank you very much.

@davieb8216 Год назад

Thanks Rosie, I might need to have a look how long droughts would effect these projects. Never know what the weather will be like in the future. I remember the Millennial drought in Victoria reduced lots of damns to critical levels . I'm assuming the pump hydro sites would be priorities or the site would lose too much head. Unless they had a way to increase the water level during droughts by inflating a Giant balloon at the bottom to lift the water level.

@davieb8216 Год назад

I had a look and it seems the drought on 2007 was a starting to become massive problem in Victoria. Also, some location in the US are having problems drought too (even the Hoover). Never seems to never be country wide droughts, so if you have a connected grid plus good policy, there will be a way around it.

@CraigFryer Год назад

Pumped hydro is largely a closed loop system, so shouldn't be greatly impacted by drought. There's still evaporation and there needs to be enough water left in the system, but other than that it means hydro infrastructure can continue to be used, if only for PHS.

@jrsubs Год назад

@@CraigFryer Evaporation is likely an important limitation of Snowy 2.0. The top reservoir Tantangara is large and shallow when full.

@earlhamil731 Год назад

The LCOE for stored VRE is pumped storage. $.05/kwhr for 10 hours stored. Lithium batteries are the highest. BATTERY STORAGE INCREASES CONSUMER COST. The other important thing is hydro/pumped storage is THE ONLY technology that can provide the 8 critical ancillary services required, most notably black start, frequency regulation, inertia. The grid DOES NOT function without these services. Batteries can do these.

@kennethbarr6842 Год назад

Hi Rosie What About Using Sea Water And Solar To Fill a Dam Next Two The Cost? And Dsanalate The Sea Water ,With Part Off The Energy?

@justbecause4557 Год назад

Could we use old mines for pumped hydro?

@fehzorz Год назад

Interested in projects like Snowy Hydro (not 2.0, the original) which are both pumped hydro and water diversion.

@manuelcilia391 Год назад

Another form of energy is in hot and cold water. The first Raygen project 3Mw/50Mwh will be turned on in the next few weeks in Carwarp Victoria and is totally Australian-designed and built. you should check it out

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Isn't the Raygen project concentrated solar thermal?

@manuelcilia391 Год назад

@@EngineeringwithRosie it is concentrated Pv and takes the waste heat from the PV and store it in dams then uses energy from the PV to run a chiller which another dam to close to zero degrees and then at night we use a ORC turbine using the water temperature differational

@lavoltare6307 Год назад

Pumped Hydro is great yes as long as there is enough water. Hoover Dam is bordering on empty due to no water, Tasmania Hydro in Australia had another problem also with not enough water of which the energy grid fell into dismay. Hydro is very expensive to build and you must have the correct topography to do so, not to mention the environmental impact. There are better solutions to follow.

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

This video is about solutions to all those issues, isn't it? At least it was supposed to be!

@johannstrauss3779 Год назад

What about round trip efficiency, cost efficiency and competitive advantage?

@Nerd3927 Год назад

Greetings from the very flat Netherlands. Is pumped hydro feasible at a building scale?

@user-nz6ug4ru8f Год назад

What do you consider feasible options for pumping DOWN (low density) fresh water under (high density) salty ocean water? Would the upward movement of fresh water trough controlled piping deliver enough power to a turbine ? I'll check chatGPT to help me figure out the minimal dimensions for a prototype. 😊

@oliverwilson11 7 месяцев назад

You use air instead of water, it's called underwater compressed air energy storage

@PinataOblongata Год назад

Awesome vid. Only just one data point, but my friend's boyfriend works in this area and it seems like a lot of gas/hydro hybrid plants are in the planning or building stages (Sydney, Melbourne, Korea, that I know of). The FF companies are still pushing gas hard, even as part of renewable infrastructure, it seems. I would love to know more about how these work and whether there is really any benefit to adding gas generation capability to them.

@EngineeringwithRosie Год назад

Interesting, I never heard of a gas/ hydro hybrid. The benefit isn't immediately obvious to me but I'll look into it. Thanks for sharing!

@oliverwilson11 7 месяцев назад

This sounds like a marketing gimmick to me. Maybe it depends on the particular electricity market design but usually there would be no benefit to owning a hydro generator and a gas generator at the same location over owning a hydro generator and a gas generator in different locations (except for grid connection costs, which can be significant). Firming one source of energy with the other doesn't require co-location, that's what the grid is for. Certainly for a market design like what we have in New Zealand (energy only spot market, locational marginal pricing) I can't see what the advantage would be.

@gavin2391 Год назад

Very cool channel

@Allan_aka_RocKITEman 10 месяцев назад

@EngineeringwithRosie >>> Great video...👍

@markjmaxwell9819 Год назад

I am a qualified fitter and turner with years of experience in all industries. Electrical hydraulics and pneumatics steam and automation just part of my experience.. Aussie inventiveness... And the future looks Rosie... 😂😂😂 😉👍

@Patriarchtech Год назад

Thank you for the video Rosie. What boggles my mind with regards to pumped hydro is the lack of creativity. The obvious thing is to look for potential height differentials on land as you covered in the video. Those are made obvious with the chart you showed. But Imagine installing each giant windmill in an offshore farm with a reservoir surrounding the windmills foundation. Windmills could then empty reservoirs when there is excess power, and have hydro turbines generate when needed. Generally the highest elevation differences you will find anywhere on earth is in the sea which is pretty much an endless reservoir. Surely it is possible to construct cylinders that displaces enough water and link them in the same way you construct submergible tunnel sections for example. You could get kilometers of head pressure and it is easily scalable with little or no environmental impact other than the construction cost which of course is significant.

@bearpoik Год назад

Right, its just immensely expensive to build reservoirs that resist the pressure. Especially in decent volumes. How much volume are you thinking of per windmill? They need to be watertight, too--at this pressure. Unbelieveably expensive...and lots of co2-concrete I suppose. Do some maths for half an hour please..and tell me whether you still think its a good idea.

@bearpoik Год назад

Just look at the challenger deep from Piccard and see how much steel it needed to withstand the pressure. The volume is not even considerable.

@adrianthoroughgood1191 Год назад

To make pumped hydro viable you need a large volume of water enclosed by a small quantity of concrete. That's why you build dams across existing valleys - 3 of the 4 sides are rock. Difference in height from upper to lower is good because you get more energy per m3 of water, but height of dam is bad because the higher it is the worse the pressure it has to hold back. So you need 2 natural formations with wide low basins at 2 heights. What you're suggesting is an entirely man made storage reservoir with narrow width and very high height where all of the height difference comes from the dam instead of the difference between the 2 locations. Plus sea water is much more corrosive than fresh water. The whole thing is a complete disaster I'm afraid. But good for you for thinking outside the box. Occasionally crazy ideas can be good. But for every good one there's 1000 ideas that don't work.

@hg2. Месяц назад

@serversurfer6169 Год назад

What about underwater pumped hydro, like the Stored Energy at Sea (StEnSea) project being developed by Goethe and Saarland universities? 🤷‍♂ Their plan is sink 20m concrete spheres 700m underwater, and then use a 5MW turbine to pump the seawater out over the course of five hours. Then letting water flow back in for four hours will generate 20MWh of power. Each unit costs eight to ten million Euros to deploy, for a facility of up to 120 units capable of delivering 600MW for four hours, or 100MW for 24 hours, etc. They've already done a feasibility test with a 3m sphere in Lake Constance, and all went well, I hear, but it's hard to find much info on it. Seems like it would avoid a lot of siting concerns that you typically have with pumped hydro though. 🤔

@NamekGregory 9 месяцев назад

Sinking concrete sphere or cylinders underwater is attractive concept even some pilots may be tested. The case you present with spheres 20 m diameter on depth 700 meter will deliver some energy. A facility with 120 Units with diameter 20 meter and 700 meter depth if will work at 100% efficiency may generate 232MWh for 4 hours, or 38MWh for a duration 24 hours. Please correct me if you support your calculations or data.

@Etheoma 11 месяцев назад

Lithium Ion batteries are not a solution for mass storage of energy, except for maybe in a disturbed fashion like hooking up EVs to the grid and selling that capacity to the grid and things like that. What Lithium Ion batteries are awesome for though is evening out momentary peaks and dips, I mean like nanoseconds which means you can run the grid closer to the redline and not have to spin up extra capacity to make sure you don't drop below demand. Obviously though they are useful for more than that, but that is what they actually accel at and is where they are highly economical feasible right now and can pay themselves off in a year or so.