Meanwhile in Germany:
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Weird way to put it... also wtf is hydro storage generating?
Electricity? Like, you use excess power to lift water and generate power from letting it descend when you need power. The latter is generated. Or am I not getting something?
I know. It never generates more than it consumes so it has negative production overall. Or is this a real-time chart despite saying “past 12 months”?
"consumption takes imports and exports into account, production ignores them"
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
I think the idea is that it only uses excess energy that would otherwise be wasted to fill it, so it kind of generates energy as it's essentially filled for free.
Yes, I know. Still, misleading: they show up negative in these power generation charts most of the time and this is supposed to be a cumulative one.
Rain fills them without consuming energy
Yes, they are part of the water cycle, sometimes collecting water from a significant area, but usually not. This is the upper reservoir of our largest hydro storage plant:
Rain is only collected over the area of the reservoir, and it would only fill up a few centimeters on a rainy day. In fact, the water evaporates quicker than that so a lake would never naturally form in this location.
Are all hydro storage like that though? It doesn't seem too outlandish to think of a hydro storage plant that is also fed by a river
I mean, at that point you would just call it a hydro power plant. Pretty much all hydropower doubles as storage due it's flexibility, but typically don't bother pumping water back up as it's a waste of energy (as opposed to waiting for the river to do it's work)
I said most
Maybe it's getting the power out of the storage.
I’ve been to a hydro storage plant and I know how it works. It stores power by pumping water into an upper reservoir when there is excess power and then letting it through turbines at peak demand. Overall, it achieves about 80% efficient energy storage whose capacity scales very cheaply as opposed to battery storage, and can respond to demand in a minute.
However, it never generates power in the usual sense so it should show up negative on an overall chart. Is this a real time one? I don't think so because it says “past 12 months”.
Could a dam lake be counted as hydro storage? That wouldn't require energy spending to pump water up, but it can work as a "cache"?
Nope, that's just regular hydroelectric. All hydro power plants have valves to control the flow and they do adjust them on demand, for turbine/filter maintenance, and/or hydrological event control.
Also, dam lake is a misnomer because lakes are naturally occurring. The correct term is reservoir. However, a reservoir can be natural and not dammed, like the oldest Czech pumped storage power plant at Černé jezero, which I visited. (The reservoir is a beautiful mountain lake and unfortunately, nature preservationists capped the water level changes to 4 cm, limiting capacity.)
Yeah I didn't know the correct term for it in English, in Finnish it's called "fakelake" or maybe more accurately "artificial lake", but fakelake sounds better
Then there are ponds and pools, which can be either natural or artificial.
I understand that it's a net loss but maybe they're only counting the power generated while unloading (which is still stupid but hey)