Series Introduction This post will review some basic facts about energy storage in general, and pumped storage in particular, because these concepts will come up throughout the later sections. Quantifying Storage First, I have to talk about how energy storage Read More

Series Introduction The Gordon Butte pumped storage design that we looked at in the previous post represents the current state of the art. Let’s continue into uncharted territory. Suppose we want pumped storage in a hot, arid climate, where evaporation Read More

Series Introduction Unsurprisingly, hydropower—the generation of electricity from water flowing in a river—preceded pumped hydroelectric storage, which is the use of water to store electricity generated from some other source than the river itself. The first commercial hydropower plant was Read More

Series Introduction Now we can talk about how our water tanks and other components will be placed on the site, and connected together to form a complete system. Here’s an idealized system diagram, in cross-section: Typically there will be more Read More

Series Introduction Solar and wind energy are inherently intermittent. The world has co-evolved with energy sources (such as fossil fuel, nuclear power, and hydroelectricity) that are not intermittent in the same way that solar and wind are; power on demand Read More

In this series, I will propose a new form of pumped hydroelectric storage that can be deployed quickly to hundreds of sites around the world, providing an aggregate amount of storage many times greater than currently exists, with low environmental Read More

Professor Obvious writes: “It should go without saying that for electric cars to make any sense at all, they must ONLY be charged when it’s sunny or windy. That makes them part of the solution to intermittency. If they are Read More