Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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The uphill water pumping power hustle is surfacing again.
This idea simply doesn’t work. First off, if you pump water from below the dam back up over the dam, you have reduced the amount of water flowing down the river ... a flow that has been set by law and treaty.
If the pumping system removes water from that flow, it would simply have to be restored by immediately allowing more water to flow through the dam.
Secondly, the power plant at the dam runs at its maximum, fixed generating capacity.
If the idea is to save up more water as an energy source when there is excess power, why not just throttle down the dam’s turbines and let the saved water accumulate in the lake? No $3 billion pumping system needed to do that.
Excess power available to the grid is good, especially if it is from renewable sources. Traditional power plants reduce their output during periods of excess. Newer technologies should do the same — wind turbines would feather some of their generators, and solar plants would simply take some of their panels offline.
Simple solar panel farms are great for peak power applications. But, instead of building an excessive amount of solar power plants with technologies that have no inherent storage capabilities, we need invest in more plants with molten salt, lithium, or other collocated, integrated storage technologies.
