Giant Hyrdo 'batteries' Anywhere There Is A Cliff Next To The Sea?

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

one of the great bugbears of traditional wind & solar renewable energy is of course storing it!

 

Is this the answer?

 

Imagine a giant hydro dam that acted as a ‘battery’ for Australia for when the renewables went down. Now imagine that it is on a flat desert plain instead of a traditional freshwater hydro dam wrecking a beautiful valley and preventing fish migrating.

 

Meet the Nullarbor hydro dam concept which instead just uses seawater and desert!

 

Simply pump the seawater up into the dam when you have excess solar and wind. When the sun goes down and you need some energy back, run it back down the 90 meter cliff through the hydro dam turbines back into the sea.

 

Now imagine that it could run Australia for 10 hours if all the renewables went down at once (which they won’t).

 

The details are found here. (PDF warning, 155 pages of renewable energy plan, and the hydro dam starts on page 49).

http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/uploads/Australian_Sustainable_Energy-by_the_numbers3.pdf

 

I’m pretty sure nukes will be far, far cheaper than these attempts to make renewables baseload, but who knows whether we can make our politicians see sense? And isn’t this journey into the next energy economy, whatever it ends up becoming, just fascinating?