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notmadnomad | 5 years ago

For fixed-site applications of sufficient land area and scale, it's difficult to beat pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH). The round-trip efficiency is around or above 70%, the same or better than CAES. CAES is probably best used in applications similar to flywheel (FES), away from occupied areas.

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doitLP|5 years ago

Do you have any recommendations on how to learn more about this?

My brother has a steep hill on his property and Ive been wondering about the feasibility of PSH. How high the tank should be, the equipment, the power output.

creato|5 years ago

You could start by just calculating the potential energy of the volume of the tank you are considering, and the difference in elevation between the reservoirs (volume x 1 kg/L x gravity x elevation difference, plug in the units of your choice and let google figure it out).

I suspect the amount of energy is far less than you are imagining... It takes a lot of water to generate a useful amount of energy. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66YRCjkxIcg) does an interesting demo and points out that a 5 gallon bucket on a ladder has the same potential energy as a watch battery.

timeinput|5 years ago

This isn't quite what you're after, but it's a pleasent read. https://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/turbine.html there have been some discussions on here about it too.

It at least gets you all the right words to start googling for turbine options which helped me to do some back of the envelope math. It's a steeper hill than seemed feasible to me.

PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago

TFA already says that large scale CAES is probably a dead end and that small scale CAES is where we might/should focus our attention.