Month: October 2020

Series Introduction Summary We can build more than 2 terawatt-hours of pumped hydroelectric storage, significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, using a novel combination of well-established technologies (no breakthroughs needed), with low environmental impact, on unoccupied land with no economic value, Read More

Series Introduction The Capitan site, with 10 GWh of storage, was one of the first locations I identified as a promising place for EPS. Since then, I’ve found a number of others. The best EPS sites will, above all, have Read More

Series Introduction Improved Rules Of Thumb Some general patterns emerged from the simulation project discussed in the last two posts, though I haven’t yet ventured far from the PNM scenario. (I have started to run simulations with Los Angeles as Read More

Series Introduction It’s time to extend the model to include storage. Early in this series, I described the three metrics for how big an energy storage system is: energy, power when charging, and power when discharging. For EPS, as for Read More

Series Introduction In the last post, I looked at a rule of thumb for estimating the storage a particular region might need. Though useful, a rule of thumb is not an adequate basis for spending billions of dollars—precise answers are Read More