Comments on: Wriggling Out of the Hydropower Conundrum https://energytransition.org/2020/01/wriggling-out-of-the-hydropower-conundrum/ The Global Energiewende Thu, 30 Jan 2020 16:11:35 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 By: James Wimberley https://energytransition.org/2020/01/wriggling-out-of-the-hydropower-conundrum/#comment-17599 Thu, 30 Jan 2020 16:11:35 +0000 https://energytransition.org/?p=21641#comment-17599 Hockenos fails to mention the crucial distinction between on-river hydro (the traditional type) and off-river. Most pumped hydro schemes are the latter, including the world’s largest at Bath County in Virginia. The two reservoirs of this huge 3 GW plant have a combined area of only 3.3 square kilometres. Off-river plants do lose water from evaporation, which has to be replaced from surrounding streams, but you don’t need a real river at all. A few plants piggyback on existing on-river dams, using their lakes as the lower reservoirs, as at La Muela in Spain. A similar scheme is projected for Lake Powell in Nevada. Obviously these have very little incremental impact on the river.

Australian scientists (Blakers, Stocks et al) have built a global atlas of 616,000 potential offriver pumped hydro storage sites, from satellite data: http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ Many of these will turn out to be unsuitable, inter alia for ecological reasons. That leaves far more than enough.

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