I guess you didn't read the article, as it directly refutes your claim.
>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.
Maybe someone on HN can convert 23 million gigawatt hours to terawatt hours and compare it to 60.
They ran an algorithm over a terrain altitude map to reach this figure. These aren't actual potential sites for hydroelectric stations. Much of these potential pumped hydro sites are in Tibet, which would be prohibitively expensive to carry out any sort of infrastructure project like this. The subset of these sites that are actually accessible for development is considerably smaller.
In short, it's a lot easier to write a paper claiming 23 million GWh of storage than it is to actually build that storage.
How many of these "not really feasible" sites do you think their algorithm identified. They are coming to the conclusion there is 100 or 250x more capacity than required (depending on country).
Do you think their algorithm is so inaccurate that only 1% or less of the sites these researchers identified would actually be suitable for pumped hydro?
Also in short, announcing an on-time, safe, profitable nuclear project is easier than actually executing it.
The sizeable majority of them. These projects entail lots of earth moving and pouring lots of concrete. These are exceptionally difficult things to do in areas without easy access via railways and roads. Which also happens to be the case in mountainous terrain where most potential hydroelectric sites are located.
Even the most successful pumped hydro storage facilities are quite expensive, too. The Bath County facility cost $4 billion for 24 GWh of storage capacity [1]. Fulfilling one day's worth of electricity storage for the United States would cost $2 trillion dollars. And that's assuming that all hydro storage facilities will be as cheap as this. In practice, once the optimal sites are developed we'll have to start building hydro storage in more difficult locations. And large areas of the country without mountainous terrain are still either left without storage, or we'll have to ship large amounts of electricity across the continent and spend yet more money on HVDC lines. And lastly, this is the cost of just storing the energy. We also need to build the actual generation capacity.
These kinds of broad, sweeping statements about how much storage potential exists is analogous to people saying we can just continue to use fossil fuels but plant trees to offset carbon emissions and pointing to a study showing that the US has sufficient landmass to do this. Yes, I'm sure the math behind that kind of very high level, coarse-grained calculation is correct. But actually irrigating that much land and relocating whatever it's currently used for is prohibitively diffuclt.
>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.
Maybe someone on HN can convert 23 million gigawatt hours to terawatt hours and compare it to 60.