Here in Australia we apparently have a virtually limitless supply of sites that are very well suited to "off-river pumped hydro", and yet there doesn't seem to be any action on this front.
I find this extra surprising because we also desperately need better fresh water management for other reasons, not least of which being our country's tendency to alternate between drought and flood.
There must be some reason we're not doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It seems to tick a lot of boxes:
- Powered by intermittent renewables, and can even be collocated
- Helps with fresh water management
- Easily to parallelize construction
- Can be operated in a federated way and replaced/upgraded/maintained piecemeal
- Requires only technology that is already extremely well-understood
There is no "action" because it would be actively stupid to build storage you have not spare renewable generation capacity to charge up. The money is, instead, correctly spent on generation capacity that actually displaces CO2 output.
Storage will be built out later.
It is not yet clear which kinds of storage are cheapest, because the costs of many are still falling fast. By the time we have a use for storage, it will be cheaper and we will know which to build.
I really don't think we have a "virtually limitless supply of sites" here in Australia - in fact I would suggest the opposite. It's a really flat continent.
I'm more familiar with the southeast, so I can't speak for Queensland, but areas that have both good rainfall and high topological relief, already have a lot of damn construction (and associated destruction of wilderness).
There's the Snowy Mountains scheme of course (which has drained dry the Snowy River of Banjo Patterson's day) and also the lesser known Shoalhaven Scheme, and in Tasmania practically every river except the Franklin is dammed.
Tasmania has had significant hydro since 1895, is currently 80% hydro powered and is 100% renewable (and aiming for 200%, to increase green supply to the mainland).
I find this extra surprising because we also desperately need better fresh water management for other reasons, not least of which being our country's tendency to alternate between drought and flood.
There must be some reason we're not doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It seems to tick a lot of boxes:
- Powered by intermittent renewables, and can even be collocated
- Helps with fresh water management
- Easily to parallelize construction
- Can be operated in a federated way and replaced/upgraded/maintained piecemeal
- Requires only technology that is already extremely well-understood
- Relatively cheap
- Relatively clean
- Quick and easy to turn on/off