It says exactly one right thing: you can put a reservoir on a hilltop, and the "head" is the height of the hill, not the depth of the reservoir.
You do not need a mountain. You do not need a high valley. It is cheap to build an earthen dike around the top of a hill, leveling off the hilltop peak for material.
The hill does not need to be steep; a shallow slope just means a longer penstock, which costs more.
A 300-meter hill is high enough for practical use. In most cases only a few hours' storage is plenty; you only need enough to make firing up a gas generator an occasional event.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
Bangladesh, The Netherlands, Kansas, maybe Texas, etc? No, not useful.
Norway, Wyoming, Idaho, California, Switzerland, Nevada, Arizona, etc.? Oh yeah. Very doable.
It still seems like the only solution that currently exists and actually works on the scale required. I’m not sure what realistic solutions are for regions where hydro pumped storage is not a viable option.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
The world produces about 3TW of electricity, 2022's battery production was 760GWh and it's growing 30-50% yoy.
Ideally degrowth happens, but while we negotiate that, the |bhattery industry is at the scale required and is rapidly shedding critical mineral requirements (sodium ion is at GWh scale now, and much larger supply chains with all abundant materials come online in june).
Pumped thermal.
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They are not bothered much by weather, in normal operation. With that much weight hanging well below the surface, they would be very stable. (Racked together side by side, moreso.) Think of it as a very long oil platform. Those endure any weather with no difficulty.
No need for anything attached to the bottom except anchor chains.
When planning ocean operation, make sure almost everything is at or well above the surface, and everything complicated (motor/generator, winch, power conversion) is well protected from exposure. Ocean deployments that expose expensive stuff to wave action or put it underwater fail, reliably. (Expect tidal generation that puts generators underwater to fail spectacularly.)
Offshore wind has the nacelle well encapsulated and everything that moves far above the waves. Nothing is underwater except the pilings, the end of the support post, and a wire.
It is all/and. There will be many kinds of storage.
We can't use much of it yet because we haven't the renewable generating capacity to charge it from. (Charging it from fossil fuels would be beyond stupid.) Several varieties are getting cheaper very fast, and new, cheaper ones are being invented, so when the time comes it will cost a lot less. Likewise, carbon capture: building that out now would be stupid if it diverted money that could be spent building renewables that displace carbon emission.
It is also why building nukes is stupid: they displace way less carbon emissions, per dollar, than renewables, and first spend a decade displacing none at all. For the price of the coal burned waiting for the nuke to come on line, you could build that much solar, never mind what you are wasting on building the nuke, and it would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately.
Batteries and pumped hydro are very far from the only practical storage media. But the assertion you read that pumped hydro does not scale is deliberately deceptive.
In that light 'pumped hydro can't scale' means 'stop trying to use this for Petawatt hours of energy storage you idiot, you'll destroy everything'.
Some of his more recent posts have been worryingly easy to coopt by the 'maek moar fossil fuels and nuclear' crowd, which his previous posts indicate he should be even more strongly opposed to.
The general message of degrowth and steady state economy is positive even if 'pumped hydro can't scale indefinitely' sounds a bit like 'pumped hydro can't decarbonize the current scale of the economy', and he gets the scale required to maintain status quo consumption a bit wrong.
I do wish he'd make this distinction clearer though.
You need a hill, but there are a very, very large number of hills. Most usually you need to build an earthen dike around the top of the hill, although often a natural feature allows it to be shorter.
The reservoir does not need to be deep because the "head" is from it to the bottom of the hill, or even to the water table well below that.
The reservoir or reservoirs are good places to float solar farms.
The most ideal locations are natural that require minimal land reshaping. Some places in the world have a lot of suitable locations like that. Others don’t.
But despite that it still seems much more feasible to build lots of hydro pump stations like that than it does to build other forms of battery farms.
Places with lots of hills will also prefer other storage media if they turn out to be cheaper. It is far from clear yet how costs will settle out. It is anyway not time yet to build more than just enough storage to shift the few hours from peak generation to peak use.