As the sun sets on California’s solar farms, a backup energy source deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains springs to life.
The huge system of reservoirs and turbines can store energy during the day and then crank out electricity for 900,000 homes, using just water and gravity.
As the state tries to make wind and solar work around the clock, officials want to build more like it. It is not likely to not be easy: Such projects take years to develop, are expensive and face stiff opposition.
The push by California and other states to revive the century-old technology — called “pumped-hydro storage” — underscores the limitations of modern batteries. While utilities are aggressively installing lithium-ion systems on California’s grid, facilities such as the aging one in the Sierras can deliver far more electricity than anything made by Tesla Inc.
“It’s not as glamorous as a battery, but it’s a tried and true technology that provides the volume that we need,” said Neena Kuzmich, project manager for a proposed pumped-storage facility near San Diego.
California’s goal to get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045 requires an unprecedented amount of energy storage.
Lithium-ion battery installations produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity at most. The 35-year-old plant in the Sierras — PG&E Corp’s Helms Pumped Storage facility — can deliver more than 1,200 megawatts at a clip.
The Swiss pioneered pumped-storage technology in the late 1800s, but it did not take off in the US until the 1960s and 1970s, when dozens of plants were built to store surplus energy from nuclear reactors and other big plants. There are seven in California alone.
Renewed interest is surging. The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued 34 preliminary permits for companies and government agencies exploring projects in New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming and elsewhere. Another 16 applications are pending. Nine are proposed in California.
The idea is simple. Take two reservoirs at different elevations, connected by pipes or tunnels. When electricity is abundant, pump water from the lower reservoir to the one uphill. When the grid needs power, let the water flow back down through turbines.
While the concept is straightforward, execution is not. The projects can cost more than US$1 billion to build. They are cheap once up and running, but the huge upfront price makes them more expensive overall than utility-scale batteries, according to BloombergNEF.
Plus, securing permits, building dams and boring tunnels can take 10 years, and since the process often involves flooding valleys, most projects face resistance.
That is particularly true in California. Environmentalists there have scrutinized pumped storage projects not just for their effect on the wilderness — but for using too much water, too.
The furthest along of the projects proposed in the state would be next to Joshua Tree National Park, using abandoned mining pits for reservoirs. It has met fierce opposition.
“It would be drawing extraordinary amounts of water from an aquifer that feeds essentially everything in the park,” said Kathryn Phillips, Sierra Club director for California.
A spokesman for NextEra Energy Inc, which bought a majority interest in the project last year, said environmental impacts were thoroughly vetted before federal regulators approved it in 2014. Construction has yet to begin.
Other projects would incorporate existing reservoirs.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has proposed converting the Hoover Dam into a giant pumped-storage facility, and the San Diego County Water Authority wants to build a reservoir uphill from an existing one to create a storage system.
Start-up Oceanus Power & Water, meanwhile, has applied for federal permits to study two spots on the coast for systems to store energy and desalinate seawater. They would pump ocean water up to a reservoir. The water would then flow back down, with some diverted into a system to remove the salt. The rest would power turbines.
“Anywhere there’s a large coastal population in a semi-arid part of the world, our solution can work,” Oceanus chief executive officer Neal Aronson said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day