It would be stupid to spend on storage before there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime they spend, sensibly, on renewable generating capacity.
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.
The storage should be built in conjunction with the renewable generation to avoid those excess grid damaging events which is just wasteful. Similar issue to US where constructing generation is being subsidised but not constructing storage along with it.
Batteries will probably be cheaper, but pumped hydro storage will probably cost about the same since it's a mature technology.
I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography.
Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as the U.S. uses (as electrical energy) in 24 hours. The idea of moving that amount of water around on short time scales is hard to fathom.
The cost of batteries is actually rising, now that manufacturing costs only make up ~25% of a battery's cost [1]. The remaining 75% is raw materials, dominated by the cathode and anode, which are having trouble keeping up with demand [2].
Pumped storage is geographically limited: as more convenient sites are developed, viable locations become more and more remote. Hydroelectric storage is great, but not the pumped kind. The energy storage supplies by the Hoover dam, the Coolie dam, dwarf pumped hydro.
It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.
Edit: I've taken a closer look at your recent comments in other threads and it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently and so aggressively that I've banned your account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Original post:
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been posting tons of unsubstantive and flamebait comments and even (as here) crossing into personal attack. Besides being the sort of thing we ban accounts for, this has the disadvantage of discrediting your own view, which is a bad thing if you happen to be right.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you about well over a dozen times in the past, which is not cool.
Edit: you've posted over 80 comments in this thread alone- most of them flamewar comments. That's extreme. Please don't do anything like that on HN again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Edit 2: you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other threads recently too. As I said, we've warned you many times. If you keep it up we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this. It's seriously not ok.
Pumped storage requires a nearby hill with a lake on top of it (otherwise earth and concrete has to be poured to form an artificial reservoir), and a nearby lower reservoir, and a nearby source of water. And if it isn't close to transportation infrastructure, building a facility becomes prohibitively expensive. As the optimal sites are developed, less and less suitable sites need to be developed.
Why is New York building battery storage at $567/KWh [1] if pumped storage is so cheap?
There a vast amount of hydro storage potential in the Himalayas, but good luck developing any of it.
So just to make sure I'm understanding you: you insist that storage is a solved problem. It's solution is so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree it's an easy problem is trolling. But on the other hand, you are unwilling to mention how grid scale energy storage in a majority renewable grid will work.
The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, unless a massively cheaper battery chemistry takes over.
Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".
I suppose I should have clarified that I meant "lake Mead if at capacity" which it isn't.
Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).
The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.
If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).
There are dozens of such reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada range in California. None of them will take as much water as Lake Mead, but they don't need to.
Sweden has lots of high mountains that may have shallow reservoirs built cheaply on top of. Reservoirs with earthen dikes are radically cheaper than the sort of dams needed for traditional hydro power, and may be placed almost anywhere, because they do not need or destroy a watershed. Lots of small ones, placed close to users, are better than one big one like Lake Mead.
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.