[Greenbuilding] Abandoned mine turned into a pumped storagesystem...

[Eli Talking]

Interesting to see broken cfl bulbs evolve into pump storage electric 
storage.

I had a client who was the plant manager for a pump storage facility in Bath
County, Virginia.  I got a tour of the plant.  It is a legitimate concept.
However, they were not claiming green kudos. When I first heard of this, I
was skeptical because it required more energy to pump than was generated
from flow.  However, my client explained that the conventional power
generators (coal, gas, nuclear,non pump storage hydro electric, et.) worked
most efficiently when at full throttle.  So Dominion Power buys the low
price electricity during times of excess production to pump water to top of
mountain reservoir to re-generate electricity during the peak load times and
higher price electricity.  They had 7 pump-generators.  They would start
them up one at a time incrementally as demand increased.  The low cost of
starting and stopping made this a good approach as compared to conventional
production.  Yeah, they had computers and high tech stuff.  However, the
switch was an old fashion pull lever.  It was interesting that they used the
same windings for both motor and generator.

This approach is appropriate for a centralized power grid.  It accepts the
line losses from consuming power produced far away.  The power regenerated
also suffers power line losses to deliver to far away consumers. It could be
a could balance with large nearby megawatt wind generators with their
sporadic production.

Eli



-----Original Message----- 
From: Corwyn
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2013 10:30 PM
To: greenbuilding at lists.bioenergylists.org
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] Abandoned mine turned into a pumped
storagesystem...


On 2/23/2013 6:28 PM, John Straube wrote:
>I too would keep an open mind on this.

They make it sound like this is a problem only with renewable energy,
when, in fact, it is a concern with all types of power generation.  The
down time for solar generators is at most a few day, and usually just a
few hours.  A nuclear plant is generally down for months to refuel.  And
storage requirements go up based on time required.  Pump storage is
reasonable proposition, I think.  The bugaboos are where you get the
water and where you put it.  A mine and a slag mountain, and captured
water, sound like reasonable choices to me, but I don't know any details.

Thank You Kindly,

Corwyn

-- 
Topher Belknap
Green Fret Consulting
Kermit didn't know the half of it...
http://www.greenfret.com/
topher at greenfret.com
(207) 882-7652


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