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I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.
BinaryHobo:
The_Nybbler:
(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)
It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.
What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.
All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.
It’s basically impossible to make a closed loop hydro system with practical capacity. You need constant water replenishment. You’ll be losing 10-30 cm of water per month to evaporation and seepage, depending on weather and soil condition. Without plentiful source of water, this is not viable.
This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate. The fact that you mention this implies that you did zero legwork to verify if your ideas have even modicum of practicality.
Even absent the replenishment concerns, the amount of height and/or volume for gravitational storage just isn't practical. A kilogram of hydrocarbon fuel has ~40MJ of contained energy. To store the same amount of gravitational potential energy in a kilo of (water, but really anything) requires lifting it 4000km.
I'm not familiar with the state of the art in biochemistry, but the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels would plausibly make them excellent storage if we could produce them (from non-fossil sources) with even moderate efficiency. Not to mention the existing infrastructure. That said, that is a nontrivial synthesis problem.
Gravity storage with water as a medium is actually quite practical, and there are plenty of operational sites already, some with GWhs worth of capacity. You don’t have to lift 1 kg of water 4000 kms, you can instead lift 40 000 kg of water by 1000 meters.
This is practical and done in production, the problem is that you need a lot of water, and a lot of space to store this water in two separate reservoirs, which also need substantial difference in altitude. Because of this, it simply doesn’t scale: good sites are already mostly used, and we can’t build many more.
Synthetic hydrocarbons would make excellent store of energy, being very dense and already integrated in existing economy. The problem with those, though, is that the round-trip efficiency is really bad.
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