Coming Soon? - Pumped Storage Hydropower

Short and sweet today…
Probably the #1 objection I encounter when sharing my enthusiasm for solar power is the intermittent nature of it.

The sun only shines for part of the day and clouds can affect it as well.

The baseline assumption many folks seem to have is that power must be generated 24/7 in order to be used 24/7.

Put another way, electric power is used ‘on demand’ therefore it must be produced ‘on demand’ as well.

For one, every power source involves storage- it is just stored at different stages along the process. Oil, when pumped out of the ground is sometimes stored- and then stored after refining (sometimes both at refinery and at power plant). Nuclear fuels are loaded into the core such that the power plant can be operated for months at a time.

For solar, especially at the grid level, storage of the power after it has been converted/produced is a contentious thing. Detractors want to focus on batteries being dangerous and toxic as well as a significant use of rare-earth materials.

That’s where other types of storage come in. Gravity and Sand batteries are one form, but seemingly the most promising is Pumped Storage Hydropower.

Excess power produced by the solar installation during the day is used to pump water from a lower reservoir to and upper reservoir. At some point later when power is needed and the sun is not shining- the water is used like in a normal hydropower plant.

The brilliance of this particular method is that the excess power produced today can be stored for very long periods of time. The water stored in the upper reservoir can stay there for months or longer with little or no losses.

Still, this particular method will have a sizable footprint that disturbs the local environment. The panel array(s) is one thing, but creating the reservoirs will require re-purposing large areas of land.

I submit that creating water reservoirs in Arizona- essentially man made lakes- might be a net positive for the local environment… Water brings life.

Anyways, I bring all of this up because of this:

“SRP-proposed reservoir passes first test in Congress”
https://www.abc15.com/news/state/srp-proposed-reservoir-passes-first-test-in-congress

To me, this is great news!
What are your thoughts on it?

Be Good!
Curtis