Be advised, if one travels to witness this place, (Bath County Pumped Storage Facility) one will likely need to be ready to trespass to get a good look unless you have a prearranged tour. The owners have a lot of money for signs and fencing. But, it's worth it, the grandeur is jaw dropping.
There's also little to no cell service due to NRQZ. There's a nice campground at the base of the lower dam.
There's actually a lot of pumped energy storage up and down the east coast of the US to take advantage of things like nuclear power arbitrage. (Always-on nuclear power is cheap at night, while on-demand hydro power has a premium during the day) Many manmade power storage lakes doubled as real estate development schemes which made them a slam dunk economically for the power company. For example, my relative has a house on Lake Keowee in South Carolina which has a nuclear power station nestled amongst multimillion dollar lakehouses, and is interlinked to both upper and lower reservoirs for energy storage and heat dissipation.
One interesting point is I doubt such projects could be replicated at all today in USA. Batteries are the way forward.
Context for your context: Bath County resevoir is descrbed as "largest battery in the world", and cost the equivilent of 4 billion dollars (in 2021 $), occupies 265 acres of land, and has a capacity of around 14,000,000 m3 of water.
I'm curious to see how the costs compare. My understanding is pumped hydro storage gets cheaper at scale. If my math is correct, 24GWH of storage at $4 billion dollars^ is $167 per kilowatt hour. What do these batteries cost to install at scale at the moment? What are they predicted to cost in the next 5, or 10 years?
^ does the 4 billion include the cost of land? Probably not important, even at an "expensive" 200k an acre, that's only 50ish million extra in costs.
Even putting costs aside it seems like it could be unlikely that such a thing could be built at all today. Flooding huge swaths of ecosystems is no longer in vogue and dam removal is picking up in pace. When was the last major scale hydroelectric dam built in USA?
It's worth noting that pumped hydro, and the dams that are getting torn down for environmental these days, often look very different.
Usually the dams that are getting torn down, block the entire river, and thus fish from passing up or downstream of the dam. (Fish ladders exist but are not particularly effective.)
Interestingly, it’s also becoming somewhat common to dam off (concrete-fence-off?) the entire top of a hill somewhere for pumped hydro. Essentially the opposite of what you’d do for a hydropower installation.
Also, pumped storage tends to be smaller, in that it’s meant to provide a certain level of discharge for hours or days. So the reservoirs can be a lot smaller.
My feeling is a big advantage for batteries over pumped hydro is utilities can can locate them on existing land they own and have use permits for. So quietly spend money today and reap the benefit immediately without having to fight Nimby's and the Sierra Club.
Pumped hydro can amortize over 50-100 years. In a true renewable grid, you will get over 50,000 cycles from the same dam (with some turbine replacements).
Thermal degradation will likely take it out before 100 years, but odds of wearing out next gen sodium ion batteries by cycling are pretty slim https://natron.energy/product/
Costs for LFP are around $350/kWh and about half consists of BOS like inverters, charge control cooling, fire control, etc.
10-20% YoY drop in manufacturing cowts is pretty likely, although demand will keep up with production and lithium extraction capacity so this might just turn into profit in the short term.
Sodium ion is presently scaling, which should remove most of this raw material limitation by late 2020s. Additionally the lower volumetric capacity, higher coulpmbic efficiency and higher thermal stability should reduce cooling and fire control.
TL;DR Some/most people expect it to drop each year similar to what solar did. I expect prices to be stable for 2-4 years while anyone with a lithium mine or existing production builds a small ocean of cash to swim in and then crash abruptly to <$80/kWh
It is a little confusing because they use the term “battery storage capacity” a bunch of times. This looks like the… amount of storage capacity that the batteries have. But I think they actually mean it as, like, (battery storage) capacity. Like battery storage is just the name of the type of thing that provides [power] capacity.
Grid resources' most salient aspect is their power rating. For lithium ion batteries, there is typically four hours of duration when discharging at maximum capacity, though sometimes it's as low as one to two hours. And for the earliest lithium ion battery that were used for frequency regulation, it was as low as 15-30 minutes of duration. But today, it's usually safe to multiply the GW by four to get GWh for grid batteries, if one cares about the GWh more than GW for some reason.
To put this in context Bath County is a reservoir that has 24GWh of storage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_S...