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This is the best entry point for this slimmed-down second series of three posts. The other two are supporting material (Part 1 covers the contour-canal reservoir scheme, and Part 2 looks at hydrodynamics). Summary The goal: provide large-scale, long-duration storage Read More

In the last post, I described a fast, inexpensive way of building evaporation-proof water storage on gently sloping terrain. One risk of building a pumped storage solution around this method is that the penstocks will tend to be long, compared Read More

I’m calling this the start of “Series 2” because, as I’ve looked at promising Encapsulated Pumped Storage (EPS) sites, I’ve noticed some recurring conditions—specific to the Mojave Desert—where, by tweaking the previous EPS design, we could build grid energy storage Read More

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