Snowdonia contains more than just some of the United Kingdom’s finest mountains. From a climate and energy perspective, the Dinorwig Power Station is rather interesting. It has a maximum output of about 1800 megawatts (MW) and was intended to store excess power from nuclear stations, during periods when their output exceeded demand.
The system takes only 16 seconds to ramp up to full output, and can maintain it for six hours. Because of backup batteries and diesel generators, Dinorwig is also able to restart itself even if the rest of the national grid has failed. The facilities two reservoirs are separated by 500m of vertical distance, and it stores about nine gigawatt-hours (GWh) of total energy. It is 75% efficient at turning surplus electrical energy into gravitational potential energy in raised water, and then back into electricity again at times of peak demand. Since it can buy electricity at times when demand is minimal (thus making the power cheap) and sell it when power was expensive, it was able to pay itself off in ten years. Along with three other British facilities, there is a total pumped storage capacity of 2.8GW.
This is a technology that could make a lot of sense for Canada. As we build more renewables – such as wind farms – there will be periods of excess energy production. By building new pumped hydroelectric facilities, or adding the capacity to existing dams, we will have a way to store some of that for when it is needed.
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“The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.”
Kannagawa Hydropower Plant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kannagawa Hydropower Plant is an under construction pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant near Minamiaiki in Nagano Prefecture and Gunma Prefecture, Japan. The power plant utilizes the Minamiaiki River along with an upper and lower reservoir created by two dams, the upper Minamiaiki Dam and the lower Ueno Dam. The power station in between the two dams will contain six 470 MW pump-generators for a total installed capacity of 2,820 MW. Only Unit 1 has commenced commercial operation and did so in 2005. When completed, the plant will have the largest pumped-storage power capacity in the world.
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