Researchers at Australian National University in Canberra, believe that pumped hydro energy stations and batteries could meet global energy needs. They have surveyed the globe and identified sufficient ‘non-river’ sites, with total capacity equivalent to 2 trillion electric-vehicle batteries. Could this potential game-changer be the hydro global battery of the future? Let’s find out.
The Logic Behind Future Hydro Global Battery Storage
We provide a link below to the full Australian National University research report. In a nut shell, they believe that renewable energy, and electrification of transport can achieve ‘deep decarbonization’.
However, for this to be feasible, we will need short (seconds to hours) and long (hours to days) duration energy storage.
The researchers have created global atlases of potential long-duration pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), at off-river, closed-loop sites. And they calculate these sites could have 86 million gigawatt-hours of storage potential. This is about 3 year’s worth of current global electricity production.
How Affordable Would a Mass Hydro Global Battery Be?
These off-river, closed-loop hydro-electeric sites would not require new dams on rivers. They would not require large areas of land either, or consume much water, the scientists continue.
Mining would be minimal too, with the result that mass pumped hydro energy storage would be cheaper than mass implementation of batteries. However, batteries would still have a role in this ‘brave new’ hydro global battery of the future.
The Australian National University model suggests that PHES storage would meet 95% of global energy storage, with batteries providing the remaining 5%. Their rationale for saying so is as follows:
- PHES is cheap for storage energy ($/GWh) but relatively expensive for storage power ($/GW). But the opposite is true for batteries.
- A hybrid energy system comprising large reservoirs coupled with batteries, would provide both low-cost energy and low-cost power.
The PHES systems would pump water uphill when solar and wind were abundant, and deliver the energy to the grid outside of those periods. Batteries would trickle-charge from surplus daytime energy too. And use it to balance, and stabilize national grids, completing the cycle.
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