My dad wanted to learn Google Earth and was just blown away when I started showing him the stuff he could see. It was about 8 years ago, or a little more.. back in the Somali pirate days... that we started looking around Colorado for good sites for floating solar and pumped hydro.

Obviously this is not a new thing.

I think Tom Scott did a video on a big pumped hydro facility in the UK. It is a good watch and explains the whole thing. It might be the same one featured in the picture with this article.

So, 35,000 sites you say? Well, let's get right to it then. Except the real number might be more like a couple hundred. Why? Well, we know what people do with very cheap capital. They invest in crap stocks, buy NFTs and give their money to crypto people. They borrow money to do it. So let's assume that UNLIMITED capital is necessary... because it pretty well is. Then the site has to be accessible AND non-NIMBYed. Accomplishing both is unicornish. PLUS the power needs to have grid access cost efficiently. PLUS, it probably needs to have nearby non-NIMBYed renewable power. If you can achieve all that, you have about a 10% return for as long as the water holds out or until someone takes it from you by hook or crook.

I am such a downer. But in the real world, there are organizations set up to forbid you from putting solar panels on your own roof. In the real world, wind power sites are being blocked in Japan to protect bear habitats. And people generally hate bears.

The technology is wonderful, the concept is elegant and efficient. Combine it with solar panels on the reservoirs AND the dams AND the surrounding countryside and it is a
hugely cool idea. It is the gantlet of accountants, lawyers, politicians and local residents that will kill all but the very best projects.

What are we going to do when even the no-brainer projects can't get built?

One more bizarre wrinkle, but it is a little counterintuitive so I will be boring. In a grid market that is growing very very rapidly, there might not be enough surplus power day or night to make a big storage project feasible. Everyone simply assumes a surplus. And a cheap surplus. But then they also assume it is replacing something else. If that deficit is being served mostly by gas peakers, though, then the marginal value of your storage might.... paradoxically... fall, or it might be underutilized. Japan is increasingly going to gas peakers and they are passing the costs on to consumers. So more renewable means more peakers means higher costs. If you put in more renewable, then you just use the peakers less... it does not mean you will get a surplus.. necessarily. If you use coal or nuclear and have giant baseload generation, then you get surpluses, and storage makes sense... pretty well always. But we all hate coal and nuclear, so....

ChatGPT: Looks like pumped hydro is the unsung hero of renewable energy storage. I guess you could say it's the "dam" good solution. (Sorry, couldn't resist)

It is a totally tubular pump and dump scheme.

Concrete Donkey: No, its not the solution subby. It required very specific conditions that 99.999999% ofthe world cannot meet, and we have dragged its bullshiat through the fire repeatedly here on fark.


fark off with your unicorn magic solutions. The only change we can make tbat will save our asses is going to require massive lifestyle changes. Suck it the fark up and start now

Helen Caldicott is perhaps the world's foremost populist hater of all things nuclear. Her solution, and she is an optimist because she sees her solution as inevitable, is to have people entertain themselves in drum circles, read Shakespeare by whale-oil lamp, and learn to dance. I mean, who needs electricity? What is all this stuff good for, anyway?

We have choices, and we are not making them. Whether it is to move ahead and consume more and produce more to make things better, or to reject that future and go back to some point in the past, people will not commit to a choice. They are waiting for a better deal, and the deals keep getting worse. Next we will DEMAND better deals and hope that works. Eventually we will force others to make sacrifices so we don't have to.

Ahem. Nuclear was not perfect, but it was a pretty good deal. We made it into a bad deal out of idealism and dragged it down. We will do the same with gas and efficient engines until we have a thin and vulnerable infrastructure supporting an elite. Somebody will make choices for us.