New Tool Estimates Cost To Build New Pumped Storage Hydropower Facilities To Support a Clean Energy Grid
“Pumped storage hydropower is maybe the most promising energy storage solution we have to achieve the huge ramp up needed to achieve a clean electricity sector,” said Daniel Inman, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who studies the economics behind these energy storage technologies.
But the decades-long gap since a pumped storage facility was last constructed in the United States makes it difficult to predict how much closed-loop facilities might cost, especially for people and organizations without much experience building these types of plants. And that means developers and grid planners lack the data needed to make informed decisions about how many new facilities the country could or should build to support its evolving grid.
Pumped storage hydropower is the biggest source of grid-scale energy storage capacity in the United States,. And yet, according to Inman, closed-loop pumped storage hydropower has been overlooked in the last decade, despite the fact that the technology protects ecosystems better than most traditional open-loop plants . Pumped hydro facilities also provide grid inertia—if a snag cuts off power temporarily, a facility’s large turbines continue spinning, helping to bridge that power gap.