“Of coarse what is not mentioned in my Lifted from wiki post is the cost in megawatts of pumping 27 billion US gallons 363 feet uphill at night.”
True. But it is an impressive project. I ran the numbers for the country based on their parameters. With 30 days of energy storage (amount required to get through worst-case bad spells), we’d need roughly 18,000 of the facilities (allowing for some down-time). The biggest immediate problem is finding or creating the storage reservoirs. In the case of this project, they had a huge lake on one side and high terrain on the other side, which was perfect for the application. Starts getting tougher to locate another 17,999 of them...
“Of coarse what is not mentioned in my Lifted from wiki post is the cost in megawatts of pumping 27 billion US gallons 363 feet uphill at night.”
True, but you do get ‘most’ of it back. 70% in the case of Michigan, but maybe a bit higher with their refurb. But, on a national level, that is still a HUGE loss of energy.
The cost is almost nothing if the power company owns the facility and the nukes. Excess power on the grid from the nukes’ minimum loads can be burnt for free pumping the water. Or if there is no excess at that output level, increasing output by 10 or 20% to cover the pumps’ needs is a tiny cost, especially compared to brownouts or having to install other additional power generation for the daytime.