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World’s biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme could serve all of Europe.
I wish to propose my plan for a pumped-storage hydro-scheme to serve all of Europe, details published at this link.
“World’s biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme, for Scotland?”
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/worlds-biggest-ever-pumped-storage-hydro-scheme-for-scotland/
The map shows how and where the biggest-ever pumped-storage hydro-scheme could be built – Strathdearn in the Scottish Highlands.
The scheme requires a massive dam about 300 metres high and 2,000 metres long to impound about 4.4 billion metres-cubed of water in the upper glen of the River Findhorn. The surface elevation of the reservoir so impounded would be as much as 650 metres when full and the surface area would be as much as 40 square-kilometres.
The maximum potential energy which could be stored by such a scheme is colossal – about 6800 Gigawatt-hours – or 280 Gigawatt-days – enough capacity to balance and back-up the intermittent renewable energy generators such as wind and solar power for the whole of Europe!
There would need to be two pumping stations at different locations – one by the sea at Inverness which pumps sea-water uphill via pressurised pipes to 300 metres of elevation to a water well head which feeds an unpressurised canal in which water flows to and from the other pumping station at the base of the dam which pumps water up into the reservoir impounded by the dam.
To fill or empty the reservoir in a day would require a flow rate of 51,000 metres-cubed per second, the equivalent of the discharge flow from the Congo River, only surpassed by the Amazon!
The power capacity emptying at such a flow rate could be equally colossal. When nearly empty and powering only the lower turbines by the sea, then about 132 GW could be produced. When nearly full and the upper turbines at the base of the dam fully powered too then about 264 GW could be produced.
This represents many times more power and energy-storage capacity than is needed to serve all of Britain’s electrical grid storage needs for backing-up and balancing intermittent renewable-energy electricity generators, such as wind turbines and solar photovoltaic arrays for the foreseeable future, opening up the possibility to provide grid energy storage services to Europe as well.
Just a technical comment: learn how to use choropleth maps. Using them to display absolute quantities is a flagrat cartographical error; the values should be first normalised by population or somethng like that, to give relative figures.
[…] Energy supply in the EU28 / Infographic by Giulio Sabbati, EPRS, 19/06/2014, 1p. “This infographic looks at the Member States’ domestic energy production, their dependency rate on external supplies, and their net imports. It also provides a picture of the diversification in foreign energy suppliers.” […]
When Gas or Oil comes on stream as a result of fracking in the UK we should insist that it is not exported under any circumstances & used to bring down the price of energy in the UK. If it cant be exported it can’t be considered as an international traded commodity & if traditional suppliers want to compete with the proceeds of fracking they will have to reduce their rates. It wouldnt be the worst idea to ban exports of traditional suppliers unless there is a surplus of requirement by the home market.