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piva00today at 1:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?

I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...


Replies

oskarkktoday at 2:23 PM

> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?

Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.

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jonatrontoday at 2:54 PM

Iron air batteries sound promising

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idiotsecanttoday at 4:24 PM

Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!

It's purely a problem of political will.