The project will take ten years to be built and will see large underground pipes connect San Vicente’s lake to a new reservoir about 1100 feet higher. California's solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir, storing electricity.At night, when solar power is unavailable, operators would open a valve releasing the force of 8 million tons of water and driving turbines capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours, enough to power 130,000 homes.
"We have a problem if we're going to have these continuous heat waves," Kuzmich says. "We need a facility to store energy so that we don't need to turn off our appliances.", and a few of these have been built over the past 30 years in the US. Now, there is renewed interest in them.Malcolm Woolf, president, and CEO of the National Hydropower Association. However, most of them are just in the planning stages.
Even Kelly Catlett, director of hydropower reform at American Rivers, an environmental advocacy organization that has in the past warned about the environmental harm caused by dams, says that "there are good pumped storage projects” and that San Diego’s looks like one of them. Catlett says, "Looks like something that we could potentially support. I'm unaware of any opposition by indigenous nations, which is another really important factor, as they have borne a lot of the impacts of hydropower development over the decades."SHOW COMMENT