There are several problems with pumped hydro. Perhaps the most obvious is that it requires a lot of water, oh, and suitable geography.
Let’s put things into perspective here.
Here’s the world’s largest facility:
https://thinkprogress.org/the-inside-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-battery-and-the-future-of-renewable-energy-8984e81283c
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The whole system is laid out over two reservoirs. The upper reservoir is smaller, fed by Little Back Creek and a 4 square mile watershed. This reservoir is an artificial lake created out of a valley, filled in by a dam made of an impervious core of 18 million cubic yards of clay and stone.
Over 1,000 feet downhill from this reservoir is a larger lake, fed by Back Creek and a larger 75 square mile watershed. The water flows out of this system into the Jackson River, then the James River, and then out to the mouth of the Chesapeake.
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The facility has 3,030 megawatts of capacity (3.03 gigawatts), meaning that when the upper reservoir is full and all 6 turbines are spinning, it can produce that much power to the grid. The average generation is 2,772 megawatts — as water exits the Upper Reservoir, the pressure of water (the head, or weight of water) turning the turbines decreases, meaning that the facility starts to produce less power when there is less water.
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Fridley explained that “We have the capability of storing 24,000 megawatt-hours up on the mountain on any given day. And if we have drought conditions that eat into that, we’re just reduced on power output. It’s as simple as that, it’s simple physics. The plan is to just let it dig into the power. Because there’s really nothing else you can do. If there’s no water, you can’t make electricity… We have not got to that point yet, but we’ve had some close calls.”
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This is
not a long-term energy storage solution. It’s used to shift power generation to meet demand. It takes several square miles, and is vulnerable to drought.
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