Except the water is in short supply, so where's that magically coming from? The Great Salt Lake is shrinking and specific to Utah. Just look at Lake Meade and Hoover Dam as an example.
Except the water is in short supply, so where's that magically coming from? The Great Salt Lake is shrinking and specific to Utah. Just look at Lake Meade and Hoover Dam as an example.
The water requirements for pumped hydro for seasonal storage is a lot less than for generation.
- pumped hydro reuses the water in a loop rather than sending it downstream like generation
- pumped hydro only needs to produce power a few times a year rather than 24/7/365 like generation.
Only if there is a very large lake at the bottom. If that lake doesn't exist then you have to build it at great cost. You also lose a lot to evaporation if you do this.
The 3.6 GW Fenging pumped storage facility holds 53 thousand acre-feet of water. Lake Mead holds 28 million acre-feet of water to run a 2 GW generator.
Just because you're using less water to power a more efficient generator does not mean the water in the lake is any less susceptible to evaporation and less water from upstream to replenish the lake.
Where "very large" is still a lot smaller than the water requirements for hydro generation.
Large enough to replace all that water requirements, without making the lake levels so high that it impacts generation. Which is to say your lake at the bottom needs to have a large surface area when full - much larger than the lake at the top.
moreover, If you built a pumped storage facility on lake Meade, it would have greater height and power from release the lower the lake was