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Pumped Storage Hydropower: The biggest batteries on earth!

This website provides a compilation of resources to accompany the Australian Water School’s 6 Oct 2021 webinar on Pumped Storage Hydropower. View the webinar recording here or view previous videos on other water-related topics on the Australian Water School’s YouTube channel:

Webinar details and presenter bios are listed here:

 

Background

The concept of Pumped Storage Hydropower is very simple…getting projects approved, designed, and constructed? Perhaps not so much!

Let’s start with the basics: Most of us charge up our mobile phones every day. If you’re off the grid, there are mobile phone chargers that can be cranked by hand, or if you were out camping near a stream, you could let water do the work for you with a Waterlily turbine or similar device:

So what if you scooped some of that water into a bottle? If the water stops moving, does it still have energy? If so, would it be enough to power a phone? The answer depends on your elevation. Let’s have a look at the puddle of water around this pile of rubbish:

If you bottled up the water that is ponded on the ground around the inconspicuous metal disc in the photo below, just how much energy would you have?

Well, as it turns out, you’d have yourself quite a windfall, or rather a waterfall of energy…that is, once you loosen the nuts. You see, this obscure pipe cap happens to open up to the deepest hole on earth, the Kola Superdeep borehole, which is located on the Russian border with Norway. The decimal represents the thousands place in the Russian notation on the cap. So it’s not 12 metres deep, but rather 12 kilometres deep, exceeding the height of Mount Everest and the depth of the Mariana Trench!

So how does elevation help you? It’s all about potential energy. If the weights on a grandfather clock can power the clock for a day as they drop a single metre, a hole as deep as the Kola borehole located right under the weights could power the clock for a lifetime! All you need is elevation (plus a really, really long chain), and you’d have all the energy you need…if only it were that easy!

So how does all of this relate to pumped storage hydropower? PSH requires an elevation difference between two reservoirs to harness the potential energy of water stored in the upper reservoir. There are a number of great videos [like this one from savree.com] showing schematic views of PSH schemes on a large scale, but the concept is perhaps most relatable when it’s done from scratch at home. Let’s introduce Quint Crispin, “the Bob Ross of Engineering”:

Watch here as “Quint BUILDs” his own pumped storage scheme right on the roof of his Oregon home:

Quint explains the mathematics behind his project here:

If you’d like to learn more about harnessing power from water at a residential scale, tune into Quint’s 6-part series on rain-gutter power, where he demonstrates the world’s first rain-powered mobile phone:

We were excited to have Quint join us on our webinar for his first collaboration with the Australian Water School, introducing his home-built system. For more Quint, including some really fun, innovative and educational videos about engineering, subscribe to the Quint BUILDs YouTube channel. But in the meantime, let’s introduce Mark “y” Mark, our two main presenters for the webinar:

Pumped Storage Hydropower Documents

Stantec’s Mark Cordell steps us through the International Forum of Pumped Storage Hydropower Reports presented at the 2021 World Hydropower Congress, which was sponsored by the International Hydropower Association:

View Mark Cordell’s presentation slides here:

As mentioned in the webinar, the congress opened with a discussion between former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is the current co-chair of the International Forum on Pumped Storage Hydropower. View their dialogue here:

Featured PSH Project Examples

Visit the website for the Snowy 2.0 project, highlighted in the webinar and in Malcolm Turnbull’s address; or better yet, next time you’re in Australia – and travel restrictions are lifted – visit the Snowy 2.0 Discovery Centre in person:

We were excited to have ILI Group CEO, Mark Wilson, on board to step us through a special pumped storage hydropower project. Read more about the Red John project in the Scottish highlands, including the famous Loch Ness here:

View the 3D rendering of the proposed project as highlighted in the webinar here:

View Mark Wilson’s presentation slides here:

Additional resources

  • Try finding potential pumped storage project sites in your area using the interactive mapping system here:

  • This documentary featuring the Turlough Hill PSH project in Ireland includes a deep dive into the penstocks and tunnels that make up a PSH project:

  • Grady Hillhouse explains pumped storage hydropower in this Practical Engineering episode:

[note the Tom Sauk reservoir in the thumbnail above, including the large swath of land indicating the path of the 2005 dam breach flood wave, which resulted when the dam overtopped after the pumps failed to turn off! An overview of the dam failure can be viewed here, with an assessment of the failure mechanisms here]

Summary

Pumped storage hydropower is an intriguing tool that we have at our disposal with a great deal of remaining, untapped potential around the planet. But as demonstrated by the Tom Sauk example, it is not a magic bullet: There are environmental issues, there are political issues, there are economic issues, and as basic as the overall concept is, there are hugely complex engineering issues.

We face a daunting problem: Power demands are increasing, but we’ve got to get emissions down. Can PSH help us optimise the solutions? Can abandoned pits and mine shafts, pressure systems, downward spiralling tunnels, ocean shoreline systems, and other applications be harnessed for energy storage?

The presentations in this webinar include some innovative new approaches to PSH, some of which hadn’t been thought of just a few years ago. If we have another webinar like this ten years from now, it is bound to include some creative new ideas for energy storage or power generation that had not yet been thought of in 2021. With the collective efforts of everyone who watches this webinar, let’s think through the possibilities and see if we can save the planet one small step at a time!

Contact

Thanks for your interest and for tuning into our webinar, and special thanks to Mark, Mark, and Quint for volunteering their time to share their expertise with us. Please contact us for questions or to suggest additional resources, because…