> "I think the goal of our facility would be to look at the opportunities to purchase purely green, renewable power and be able to supply green power to the grid," he says.
So right now it's fueled by... gas and coal.
They could just buy clean, green energy from up north (if lobbyists hadn't killed the project). [0]
[0] https://apnews.com/article/election-2021-maine-hydropower-li...
It is never just one thing you care about. CO2 matters. Price matters. Safety matters. Aesthetics matters. Public relations matters. Not all matter the same amount, but none are irrelevant either. Finding a real world solution is about making the best trade offs possible. You can’t just identify the most important factor and declare that the n-1 others are irrelevant
Cost is the main reason for nuclear plants to be closed. The companies operating them have to make a profit and that's hard when your competition runs circles around you in terms of cost and undercut your pricing to the point where you are losing money. Keeping aging, expensive nuclear plants open costs a lot of money and requires continuous investments. It simply can't be done without tax payer money and a state protected monopoly on prices.
Sounds like they care about both carbon and money. Smart.
Do you have actual stats on what the current power mix is?
Looking it up, it seems they only use coal in that region during peak periods, when pumped storage won't be running, so they're probably already close to 100% clean.
Your better off putting floating solar panels on top
It's not 100%, but it's not bad.
It may be cheaper to just offer time of use pricing to incentivize demand response. EV charging, washing machines, and dishwashers use timers to shift demand to off-peak hours. HVAC and water heaters can be connected via smart grid switches or thermostats. Precooling or preheating can be exploited. During the highest demand days temperatures can be relaxed or units can be duty cycled by splitting customers' units into four groups A B C D and running each for 15 min. to smooth out a soften a sharp spike in total demand.
We pulled into the visitor's center, outside of the mountain. He often took the family to things like this because he worked for the power company, so I just thought we were stopping at a place that he heard of at work. Then we got into a bus and drove inside and took a tour.
That was one of the coolest things I ever saw as a teenager.
I remember getting semi-private, and slightly off-the-official-track tour of a nuclear power plant by my Dad. His company was involved in servicing the plant during an outage. It was open for organized public tours during that time (an idea that just seems bonkers now). My brothers and I got to see that part, and even a little bit more.
I was pre-teen at the time and unfortunately he has passed. I really wish I could get more details from him on this and other stories.
Some of the memorable things were being able to go into the control room with a bunch of green screens, walking up to the spent fuel pool, a drive through tour on a school bus through the outdoor spent fuel storage facility, and seeing an SGI workstation (with 3D shutter goggles!) that they used to model water flow of Lake Ontario in the event of an inadvertent release. I distinctly remember the unique smell of the second plant, something akin diesel exhaust.
This would be unheard of in this day and age.
It was a different time.
I now do the same thing with my (now) teenager. He grumbles about it now that he's older, but he still enjoys it.
> Northfield Mountain is a naturalist's wonderland. But if you look around, you'll see an unnatural site: a 5-billion-gallon battery.
Energy capacity: 5b gallons * 8.35lbs/gallon * kWh/2,655,220ft-lb (pounds raised 1 ft) = 15.6MWh per foot raised or lowered. At $10m, that's a ridiculous amount of capacity.
This is 10M$/15.66MWh/ft. The last is what makes this absurdly cheap. If those 5b gallons are raised up from the source only 1 foot, it'd be $0.64/watt-hour, more expensive.
But if you lift that water up 6 feet, it's down to $0.1/watt-hour, and suddenly you're at parity for the best anyone can expect. Lift that water up a 200 ft hill and you're down to $0.0032/watt-hour stored. Lifting a huge body of water is a colossal amount of work, it turns out, and thats what makes pumped hydro storage absurdly cost-effective.
Please also note the other comment. Apparently the new 5b gallon project is not $10m, it's unknown what it will cost, the $10m was for an old project. Even without knowing the cost of this new project, I expect the final figures will blow li-ion storage prices out of the water. For ex, if it it cost 10x more, $100m, but is up a 200ft hill, it's still $0.032/watt-hour. And there's really not a strong reason to stop at 200ft either; it's limited mostly by whatever the terrain offers (and how cost effectively one can engineer strong pumps & tubes. turns out we're pretty awesome at that.).
... uh, no. Pumps force the water up into the reservoir; gravity alone pulls the water back down and through the turbine-driven generators.
> Actually, the Sisyphean labor of pumping water up and down the mountain is a net energy loss -- more electricity is used then generated.But because off-peak electricity costs less than the price Northfield gets for what it generates when demand is high, the system is a moneymaker.
I think I understand what they’re saying but it makes it sound wasteful
Just in case it's not clear to anyone (or to you) they pump the water up the mountain with cheap (often renewable) energy when there's a surplus, and then release it instead of turning on the more expensive gas generators to fuel the peak demand.
This is the equivalent of storing water from a river in a reservoir when you aren't watering your field. Sure, some of it evaporates but you aren't just letting it run into the ocean.
If he later touches on this location as well, I apologize, but the intro didn't indicate it might
US peak demand is around 700 GW. That is about 0.25 km3 of water with 3000 m of elevation.
This is a lake 5km x 5 km and 10 m deep
When you need X from renewable you actually need 4X at least to be sure having enough in bad moments, energy is extremely* important and we can't going soft with it. Hydro is largely the best renewable since is almost constant (with their seasons, but still pretty stable) however is not as predictable and constant ad an NPP or an oil/gas/coal one.
So far very few countries have been able to run on mostly hydro only, all small, with little industry and very mountainous. Unfortunately too many dream miracles of free energy everywhere instead of trying...
A section of the upper reservoir's dam wall was overtopped, the pumps continued to run, and the section failed, releasing a billion gallons of water in 12 minutes. The flow washed away the forest and soil down to the bedrock. One home was destroyed and its occupants injured, though thankfully there were no deaths.
The failure had several causes, but the most infamous one is that the failsafe gauge had been moved above the top of the dam wall to avoid false positives.
The reservoir was repaired and as far as I know continues to operate. I backpacked in the area several times and the dam wall has a striking appearance on the horizon.
> Engineering studies for the plant began in October 1964, with early site preparation starting three years later. In 1972 its 1,168 megawatts (1,566,000 hp) hydroelectric plant became operational as the largest such facility in the world.[citation needed] The facility was built to balance the supply from the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.[3]
A very common reason for building these historically.
Damn. Just a little more and they'd be making "1.21 gigawatts, Marty!"
