

Pump Up the Storage (2011) - youngerdryas
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

======
ben1040
Of note: what happens when a pumped storage reservoir fails.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_Station#Upper_reservoir_breached)

------
jellicle
This is a poor article full of unrealistic assumptions. It's basically as if
you took a worst case for CPU cache assumptions and then decided that,
therefore, it would never be useful to put a cache on a CPU.

Not actually true.

In the real world, the wind is always blowing somewhere and the amount of
sunlight falling is quite predictable. Fossil fuel plants aren't going to
disappear entirely for a long time, but there is absolutely no obstacle to
producing MOST of our energy needs from renewable sources. Real world storage
installations are going in, in suitable places, all the time:

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/industry-n...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/in-eastern-ontario-a-battery-five-
times-the-size-of-niagara-falls/article8820070/)

The cumulative effect of all these batteries will be quite large, and no, it
isn't necessary to store 7 days * the entire energy needs of the United States
in order to be useful.

~~~
venus
I think you're reading the article in a quite biased manner. I didn't pick up
on any of the negativity you seem to have interpreted.

I don't think anyone here is against renewable energy, but certainly the
storage of it represents a gigantic challenge. The article just tries to table
some reasonable numbers for discussion. You've said nothing that even slightly
contradicts the author's findings, and your vague insinuations that the author
has an anti-renewable energy agenda is not helpful at all.

~~~
jellicle
The author's calculations are for replacing the entire energy diet of the
United States. He uses gross inputs to everything, rather than outputs and
usable energy. He neglects any other storage capacity present in the country -
no vehicle has any battery, no electrical device has any battery - and tries
to calculate how much energy we need to store IF THE ENTIRE ENERGY PRODUCTION
CAPACITY OF THE UNITED STATES DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY FOR A WEEK.

It's a nonsense calculation. The U.S. certainly isn't prepared today to go for
a week without any electricity generation or even a single drop of fossil fuel
burned, and there's no reason to demand that it be prepared to do so in the
future.

The "findings" are akin to someone who says "The U.S. is borrowing a dollar a
year. If we extend that to infinity, we find that the U.S. debt is infinite.
PANIC!". They're nonsense. Have no meaning in the real world.

In the real world, one significant benefit of a widely distributed power
generation infrastructure is that it won't all go down at the same time. The
solar cells on your roof will keep generating electricity even if it's cloudy
the next town over. And that means that the real-world requirements for a
several-nines-reliability mostly-renewable energy infrastructure are several
orders of magnitude less than what is being calculated here.

