The article doesn’t make this clear so I am assuming those numbers represent GWh of storage.
To put this in context Bath County is a reservoir that has 24GWh of storage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_S...
To put this in context Bath County is a reservoir that has 24GWh of storage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_S...
There's also little to no cell service due to NRQZ. There's a nice campground at the base of the lower dam.
There's actually a lot of pumped energy storage up and down the east coast of the US to take advantage of things like nuclear power arbitrage. (Always-on nuclear power is cheap at night, while on-demand hydro power has a premium during the day) Many manmade power storage lakes doubled as real estate development schemes which made them a slam dunk economically for the power company. For example, my relative has a house on Lake Keowee in South Carolina which has a nuclear power station nestled amongst multimillion dollar lakehouses, and is interlinked to both upper and lower reservoirs for energy storage and heat dissipation.
One interesting point is I doubt such projects could be replicated at all today in USA. Batteries are the way forward.
I'm curious to see how the costs compare. My understanding is pumped hydro storage gets cheaper at scale. If my math is correct, 24GWH of storage at $4 billion dollars^ is $167 per kilowatt hour. What do these batteries cost to install at scale at the moment? What are they predicted to cost in the next 5, or 10 years?
^ does the 4 billion include the cost of land? Probably not important, even at an "expensive" 200k an acre, that's only 50ish million extra in costs.
EDIT: numbers..
I think that there are pros and cons of each, we'll end up with a mix of lots of different solutions.
Edit: looks like the information is here somewhere in the national dam inventory: https://nid.usace.army.mil/#/dams/search/&viewType=map&resul...
But I am very tired and must sleep so I will not query.
Usually the dams that are getting torn down, block the entire river, and thus fish from passing up or downstream of the dam. (Fish ladders exist but are not particularly effective.)
Pumped hydro may sit by the side of a river, but otherwise not obstruct the flow, and so that is not a major issue. (Example rendering: https://cdn.forumcomm.com/dims4/default/3ac369d/2147483647/s...)
It also makes a lot more sites interesting.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...]
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf
My feeling is a big advantage for batteries over pumped hydro is utilities can can locate them on existing land they own and have use permits for. So quietly spend money today and reap the benefit immediately without having to fight Nimby's and the Sierra Club.
And batteries are perfect for grid stabilization.
10-20% YoY drop in manufacturing cowts is pretty likely, although demand will keep up with production and lithium extraction capacity so this might just turn into profit in the short term.
Sodium ion is presently scaling, which should remove most of this raw material limitation by late 2020s. Additionally the lower volumetric capacity, higher coulpmbic efficiency and higher thermal stability should reduce cooling and fire control.
TL;DR Some/most people expect it to drop each year similar to what solar did. I expect prices to be stable for 2-4 years while anyone with a lithium mine or existing production builds a small ocean of cash to swim in and then crash abruptly to <$80/kWh
It's really silly to assume that the literal Energy Information Administration doesn't know the difference between the units of watts and watt-hours.
Battery power capacity is watts.
Battery energy capacity is watt-hours.
This article is talking about power capacity.
It is a little confusing because they use the term “battery storage capacity” a bunch of times. This looks like the… amount of storage capacity that the batteries have. But I think they actually mean it as, like, (battery storage) capacity. Like battery storage is just the name of the type of thing that provides [power] capacity.
Grid resources' most salient aspect is their power rating. For lithium ion batteries, there is typically four hours of duration when discharging at maximum capacity, though sometimes it's as low as one to two hours. And for the earliest lithium ion battery that were used for frequency regulation, it was as low as 15-30 minutes of duration. But today, it's usually safe to multiply the GW by four to get GWh for grid batteries, if one cares about the GWh more than GW for some reason.