Obviously, assuming you have that hill.
Slightly harder to do in places like the Netherlands for example, where the tallest hill is 322 metres, and the second tallest that isn’t part of that same mountain range near the Belgium border is just 110.
Comment on This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery
Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
I wonder if this suffers from the same power density issue as most alternatives to pumped hydro systems. It's REALLY hard to do better than megatons of water pumped 500 meters up a hill.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
SteevyT@beehaw.org 1 week ago
In the cycling world it’s kinda funny how people try to make a low climbing century (100 mile route), and where I am I have a glut of choices for centuries with well under 1,000 meters of climbing. I just cleared out a bunch of my routes, and still have two century routes with under 600m of climbing.
Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
True! I just wonder how much energy they'd realistically be able to store for a given amount of resources. I just wonder if this has the same issues as Lifted Weight Storage, where the energy density just doesn't really make sense once you get right down to it. I don't know the relevant math to determine how much water and at what pressures might be required to scale this up to the 500MWh/1GWh range. It might be perfectly fine.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
yeah, the scalability of this seems like a pretty big challenge
annoyingly, they talk about the amount of water they pumped only in terms of energy (35MWh) and not in terms of water volume.
I think they do that because, if you estimate the water volume…it’s pretty unimpressive.
going off the numbers for Bath County Pumped Storage Station, the largest in the US, and until 2021 the largest in the world:
total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh - meaning that this power station built in the late 70s / early 80s has almost 700 times the storage capacity of this 35MWh demo
between their upper reservoir and lower reservoir, their water capacity is 78.4 million cubic meters. so as a crude estimate, Quidnet’s demo project used ~115,000 cubic meters.
Olympic swimming pool contains 2.500 cubic meters. so, again with the caveat that this is a rough estimate because Quidnet didn’t publish the actual numbers…this demo they’re bragging about involved 45 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.