While the need for coal may be dying, that doesn’t mean to say the place in where it was once made, can’t still be put to good use. In April this year, the Virginia state senator pushed through legislation that encouraged companies to transom disused coal mines into giant storage facilities capable of holding large amounts of renewable energy.
The idea is to fill the disused mines with water, then use electricity generated by the wind or solar power to pump it up to a reservoir to be used at a later date. Utilities would then access the power as needed by opening up the floodgates and letting the water gush back into the turbines on its descent.
While this type of technology is not new, it’s been largely ignored for many years. The idea first came about in 1909 at a Swiss hydroelectric plant, but never really took off anywhere else until the 1960’s and 1970’s. Now, it’s being recognized across the world as the need for grid-scale alternatives to lithium-ion batteries increases.
Unfortunately, as great as the wind and solar power are, they don’t supply a steady stream of energy and for that reason, we need effective battery storage systems in place in which to save this free energy. The problem we are seeing with the existing lithium-ion batteries is that they just can’t be built to the scale in which we need them. They may be useful in cars, but when talking grid-scale size, it’s just not feasible.
For that reason, developers have begun to look in other places to try and find an alternative solution, and that’s when they thought about pumped water storage technology. Whether this technology will work in the old mines remains to be seen, but developers from the UK to Germany, to the US are all willing to give it a go.
In southeastern California, a transmission line runs along Interstate 10 that connects solar farms in the Sonoran Desert to the city of Los Angeles. Every day, from daybreak to nightfall, electricity is pumped through the line as photovoltaic panels absorb energy from the sun. The problem is that the line goes quiet as soon as millions of people turn on their lights, and that’s what experts are trying to stop. As stated by Steve Lowe, president of Eagle Crest Energy Co. “When the sun sets, that line goes empty. We want to do something about it.”
Eagle Crest have partnered with NextEra Energy Inc in a joint venture of building a 1.3 gigawatt pumped hydro facility near Desert Center. The project is all set to go ahead and has been given the go-ahead by federal regulators. If a success, the $2 billion project could store enough energy to power almost 1 million homes. Two pits that are left over from an old defunct iron-ore mine will be used. During the day, the water will be moved by the pumps to the upper pit, ready for release at night. Lowe expects the facility to take around six years to construct.
It’s fairly obvious that pumped hydro is the most efficient form of energy storage there is currently, and with more than 40 facilities already in place worldwide with a combined capacity of more than 20 gigawatts, that’s a lot of room for potential energy to be stored. Although hydro facilities aren’t cheap to build, the savings that will be made in the long run will make them worthwhile, especially when we can make use of old defunct mines.
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