The San Vicente Reservoir in San Diego County stores water as far as the Colorado River. Pumping water into a smaller reservoir in the surrounding mountains can store excess solar energy until sunset.
Dan Charles for NPR
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The San Vicente Reservoir in San Diego County stores water as far as the Colorado River. Pumping water into a smaller reservoir in the surrounding mountains can store excess solar energy until sunset.
The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the picturesque San Vicente Reservoir to store solar energy to keep it available after sunset. The project and other similar projects can help unlock America’s clean energy future.
Perhaps in ten years’ time, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, much smaller, built in a nearby canyon at an altitude of about 1,100 feet. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir.
It is a way to store electricity. When the sun goes down and the sun’s power goes out, the operators open the valve, and the force of 8 million tons of water falling back through the same pipes would drive turbines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. This is enough to power 130,000 typical homes.
Neena Kuzmich, associate director of engineering for the San Diego County Water Authority, is working on plans for pumped energy storage at the San Vicente reservoir.
Dan Charles for NPR
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Neena Kuzmich, associate director of engineering for the San Diego County Water Authority, is working on plans for pumped energy storage at the San Vicente reservoir.
“It’s a water tap!” says Neena Kuzmich, deputy technical director at the water authority. He says energy storages like these will become increasingly important as California begins to rely more on wind and solar power to produce electricity on their own schedules without caring about consumer demands.
Californians learned this in the heatwave of last summer. “Everyone in the state of California, I believe, got a text message at 5:30 p.m. to shut down their devices,” says Kuzmich. The sun was setting, the solar generation was fading away, and the remaining power plants, mostly gas-fired, were not keeping up with demand. The alarm worked; People stopped using so much energy, and the network survived.
However, earlier that day, there was so much solar energy that the grid was unable to bear it. Grid operators ‘cut back’ or rejected more than 2,000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could provide to power a small town. This electricity was wasted and could not be stored for later when grid operators desperately needed it.
“We have a problem with constant heat waves,” says Kuzmich. “We need an energy storage facility so we don’t have to turn off our devices.”
The technology proposed by San Diego, called hydroelectric energy storage, already works in more than 40 locations in the United States. Some of the largest, which can generate over 1,000 MW for up to eight hours, were built in the 1970s and 1980s to store electricity that nuclear power plants produced at night. However, few new plants have been built in the United States in the last 30 years. China is still building them.
One of the reservoirs of Huanggou Pumped Storage Power Plant in Hailin, China’s Northeast Heilongjiang Province, June 29, 2022. The plant has a production capacity of 1,200 megawatts.
Wang Jianwei / Xinhua / Getty Ima press agency
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| Wang Jianwei / Xinhua / Getty Ima press agency | One of the reservoirs of Huanggou Pumped Storage Power Plant in Hailin, China’s Northeast Heilongjiang Province, June 29, 2022. The plant has a production capacity of 1,200 megawatts. |
| Wang Jianwei / Xinhua / Getty Ima press agency | Now the need to store energy from renewable sources is sparking interest in this old technology in the US. |
| “In the past few years alone, 92 new projects have entered the development phase,” said Malcolm Woolf, president and CEO of the National Hydropower Association. However, most projects are in the planning stage and still require regulatory approval and funding. | Thanks to the climate bill President Biden signed in August, these projects now qualify for the same 30 percent tax credit as solar and wind projects. “This is an absolute game changer,” says Woolf. “Many of these projects, which have been in the pipeline for several years, suddenly become much more profitable.” |
| Water batteries have many competitors when it comes to energy storage. Some companies, including the car company GM, are investigating ways in which the electrical grid can draw emergency energy from the batteries in millions of private electric cars. Others are working on ways to store electricity by compressing air or producing hydrogen. Still others focus on how to manage electricity demand rather than supply. For example, electric water heaters can be remotely controlled to run when electricity is plentiful and turn off when electricity is lacking. | There are advantages to pumping water, however. It is a proven way to store huge amounts of energy. The San Vicente project would store roughly as much electricity as the batteries in 50,000 Tesla Model 3 long-range cars. Water batteries also don’t require hard-to-find materials such as cobalt and lithium, and the plants can last for over a hundred years. |
An upper reservoir site sign details the Public Service Company’s Cabin Creek Pumped Storage project, a hydroelectric installation at an altitude above 10,000 feet near Georgetown, Colorado on April 22, 1965. Read also : Solar-biomass hybrid system satisfies home heating requirements in winter.
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An upper reservoir site sign details the Public Service Company’s Cabin Creek Pumped Storage project, a hydroelectric installation at an altitude above 10,000 feet near Georgetown, Colorado on April 22, 1965. This may interest you : What are the different types of solar energy ?.
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The biggest problem with them, at least according to some, is that it is difficult to find places to build them. They need large amounts of water, topography to build lower and higher reservoirs, and a regulatory permit to disturb the landscape.
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Woolf says, however, that perception of the limited perspectives of water being pumped “is a myth that I work hard to correct people from.” He says pumping stations don’t have to be as massive as those of the last century, and they don’t have to obstruct the free flow of streams and rivers. Many of the proposals are for “closed” systems that use the same water over and over again, carrying it back and forth between two large ponds, one taller than the other, like sand in an hourglass.
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Three of the proposed US projects that appear to be the closest to the breakthrough, in Montana, Oregon, and Southern California, are operating as closed loops.
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Kelly Catlett, director of hydropower reform at American Rivers, an environmental organization that has highlighted the environmental damage caused by dams, says that “there are good pumped storage projects and not very good pumped storage projects.”
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Her group will not support projects that build new dams on streams and rivers, disrupting vulnerable aquatic ecosystems. But the San Diego plan, he says, “looks like something we could potentially endorse” because it uses an existing reservoir and doesn’t interfere with any flowing streams. He also says, “I am not aware of any opposition from the indigenous peoples, which is another really important factor as they have suffered many of the effects of hydropower development over the decades.”
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San Diego County Water Board Board and San Diego City Council are expected to vote soon on whether to proceed with the detailed engineering design of the San Vicente Reservoir pumped storage power plant. The state of California earns $ 18 million. Design work followed by regulatory approvals, financing and actual construction is likely to take a decade or more.
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What is the most used renewable energy source in 2022? Solar PV is likely to account for 60% of global renewable energy growth in 2022, followed by wind and hydropower.
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The solar panels will get dirty over time. Typically, rainfall will be a consistent and effective method of cleaning the panels. However, in drier climates, where rainfall is minimal and sandstorms are often a problem, it may be necessary to periodically flush the solar panels.
