Florida Power and Light lobbyists made it illegal to use solar during outages

[pucksr]

@jgs

Not clear to me without chasing down the study, though, if it relates only to conventional hydro, i.e. water comes in the top, goes out the bottom, it’s an energy source, vs. pumped-storage where water comes in the bottom, goes out the bottom, it’s basically a very damp battery, you could do it with piles of rocks instead of water as your potential energy sink except fluids are so much easier to work with.

(That said, I already speculated in my earlier post that it’s probably hard to find geography friendly to pumped-storage, at an affordable price.)

The study was in reference to available geography. I am sorry I wasn’t clear. My point is that we have essentially “maxed out” the geography.

@jgs

he Wikipedia “pumped-storage hydroelectricity” article sez “The round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies between 70%–80%,with some sources claiming up to 87%”, which doesn’t seem like a “huge efficiency loss”? Actually it seems pretty reasonable, not far off from the 80-90% cited for LiIon batteries.

The 87% figure came from one old HECO(Hawaiian Electric Company) website.
The DoE labs put it at 80.4% in their white papers -https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60806.pdf
So, I would put it down lower at 80%. That isn’t great.
It is a little misleading to quote that lower number you saw for Li-ion batteries. That was from a paper on electric vehicle battery efficiency. The actual stated charge/discharge efficiency of a Li-ion battery is normally stated as >95%

Sorry, wikipedia has some very misleading information on this topic.

So, if you consider that someone fudged the number a bit high for your pumped hydro and fudged it a bit low for your lithium, then you see that it is actually a huge level of inefficiency. Then again, it probably doesn’t matter. But if comparing technologies to store energy: hydrogen<PHS<batteries