Range of the carbon costs of pumped hydro energy storage. [View all]

Around here, we often hear absurd suppositions that energy storage is the same as primary energy.

No matter how many times I point to the irrefutable and immutable 2nd law of thermodynamics, we still hear this nonsense on a planet where energy is dominated by dangerous fossil fuels.

The worst cases of these are the hydrogen scam followed by the battery scam, both of which are destructive to the environment.

A third example exists, which used to show up around here from time to time, pumped hydro storage. It is also subject to the 2nd law, but the question is how much energy is lost in the storage process.

I'm not going to go through this paper which I will link below in any detail at all, but just produce the range of carbon costs of this scheme, which in any case will depend on access to water, said access being less than secure owing to the fact that after half a century of jawboning about the grand reactionary so called "renewable energy" scheme and the expenditure of trillions of dollars on it, climate change remains completely and totally unaddressed.

To make matters worse, people are squandering vast sums of money on energy storage when primary energy remains dirty requiring the use of more primary energy.

This brings me to the paper in question, this one: Life Cycle Assessment of Closed-Loop Pumped Storage Hydropower in the United States Timothy R. Simon, Daniel Inman, Rebecca Hanes, Gregory Avery, Dylan Hettinger, and Garvin Heath Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (33), 12251-12258.

From the text:

The wind industry and solar industry are tiny and insignificant according to the most recent World Energy Outlook, despite the expenditure of trillions of squandered dollars, and loud cheering. (The 2023 version of the WEO should be out in November; as I follow carbon dioxide concentrations weekly, I doubt they'll be big changes.) I'm not entirely sure that the wind and solar industry can support all the power server and computer time dedicated to saying how great they are.

As is the case with the "green hydrogen" scam, and the almost as bad battery scam, the popularity of which generates far more complacency than energy, energy storage with pumped hydro wastes energy.

A figure from the paper giving some of the carbon costs of pumped storage energy:



The caption:



Reliable nuclear energy based on the inefficient Rankine cycle which dominates nuclear power plants around the world, 33% Carnot efficiency approximately depending on the ambient temperatures, is generally rated at a carbon cost of between 5 g CO2/kwh and 25 g CO2/kWh. I have convinced myself that thermochemical processes might raise this efficiency well above 50%, perhaps into the 70% range, particularly if electricity is a side product rather than a main product. Another side product of these system approaches, exploiting the high temperatures accessible for nuclear fuel in use, would be the ability to adjust power output to electrical grids as are well known on a diurnal basis.

Have a pleasant Sunday.