Tidal Lagoon - Energy from the Ocean, UK Gov is putting money in it

[tggzzz]

The whole of the south east of the UK is slowly tipping into the sea as well but on the up side Scotland is rising,so that should help a bit.

It isn't rising as fast as the sea is rising Or maybe

[zapta]

I am wondering if you could use it in the Panama or Suez canals.

Or the Dead Sea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Canal

[G7PSK]

There was once a plan to dam the straights of Gibraltar for a hydro electric scheme. The idea being the Mediterranean would evaporate at such a rate that there would be a level difference with the Atlantic. There was objections due to both cost and what it might do to the climate so it was not taken seriously.

[coppice]

There's another small issue with building anything on top of an English cliff, most of them are collapsing into the sea on a regular basis

I'll modify that just a little. Once upon a time they were hills, ripples left over from when Africa hit Europe. But the hills gradually collapsed into the sea - thereby forming the cliffs.

Either way, they are useless for pumped storage.

Well, the cliffs aren't entirely useless. If you step back a kilometre from the cliff edge you are far enough away that the crumble rate won't get you in trouble for a fair while, the land can probably support the weight of the damed pool, and the pipe losses aren't astronomic. The vertical displacement is certainly going to be a lot less than ideal. However, the main issues is that land is heavily populated. To build a circular dammed structure large enough to be useful, even if you make the pool inside it quite deep to minimise its width, is going to require displacing a lot of people. This is definitely a high impact project idea.

[Someone]

The famously high cliffs around the UK coastline are an immediate and very cost effective location for storage, and all the estimates I can come up with show enough capacity to meet the quantities of storage being discussed here. It takes land away from other uses (as you cant store enough with tidal only) but these are the trade-offs required when trying to meet energy independence with renewables.

Snort! Now you're just tossing out ideas to see who salutes them! You are clearly completely unfamiliar with the topography and size of the UK.

The famous cliffs in the south reach a peak, and I mean peak-as-in-point, height of 150m/600ft, here: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=337987&Y=93035&A=Y&Z=115  As you can see when you look at the height and slopes, there's not much scope for hydro there! The rest of the south coast is pretty much the same. The rest of the UK's cliffs are not much better.

In contrast, in the vicinity of populated areas, Australia appears to have ~30000 square miles of more-or-less unpopulated ground above 2000ft - which would be suitable for pumped storage. Repeat after me, "UK != Australia".

Do some maths if you don't believe whats written in the Sustainable Energy - without the hot air reference we have all agreed is excellent. Here are some simple starts:

The total storage reservoir surface area of the UK's existing 20-30GWh of pumped storage is approximately 6 square kilometres, the total area of standing water in the UK is around 2000 square kilometres. This is before you consider the building of dams or purpose specific reservoirs.

From that its believable that you could fit the above discussed 4000GWh of energy (enough to ride through several days of zero generation from other sources) into reservoirs covering 1200 square kilometres, with the UK totalling over 200,000 square kilometres this is only 0.5% of the land area of the UK.

Tidal pool, thermal, and other storage techniques could contribute further without using land area.

Feel free to come up with numbers or references to show how these are impossibilities, because every analysis I see on pumped storage adds up.

[Someone]

There's another small issue with building anything on top of an English cliff, most of them are collapsing into the sea on a regular basis

I'll modify that just a little. Once upon a time they were hills, ripples left over from when Africa hit Europe. But the hills gradually collapsed into the sea - thereby forming the cliffs.

Either way, they are useless for pumped storage.

Well, the cliffs aren't entirely useless. If you step back a kilometre from the cliff edge you are far enough away that the crumble rate won't get you in trouble for a fair while, the land can probably support the weight of the damed pool, and the pipe losses aren't astronomic. The vertical displacement is certainly going to be a lot less than ideal. However, the main issues is that land is heavily populated. To build a circular dammed structure large enough to be useful, even if you make the pool inside it quite deep to minimise its width, is going to require displacing a lot of people. This is definitely a high impact project idea.

Yes, competing land use demands are a challenge to siting any development. But as the numbers show, when compared to alternatives for securing energy pumped storage competes exceedingly well. Unlike the wastelands around conventional power plants (look at a coal plant and its associated mines some time) pumped storage pools remain useful for recreation or aquaculture.

[tggzzz]

The famously high cliffs around the UK coastline are an immediate and very cost effective location for storage, and all the estimates I can come up with show enough capacity to meet the quantities of storage being discussed here. It takes land away from other uses (as you cant store enough with tidal only) but these are the trade-offs required when trying to meet energy independence with renewables.

Snort! Now you're just tossing out ideas to see who salutes them! You are clearly completely unfamiliar with the topography and size of the UK.

The famous cliffs in the south reach a peak, and I mean peak-as-in-point, height of 150m/600ft, here: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=337987&Y=93035&A=Y&Z=115  As you can see when you look at the height and slopes, there's not much scope for hydro there! The rest of the south coast is pretty much the same. The rest of the UK's cliffs are not much better.

In contrast, in the vicinity of populated areas, Australia appears to have ~30000 square miles of more-or-less unpopulated ground above 2000ft - which would be suitable for pumped storage. Repeat after me, "UK != Australia".

Do some maths if you don't believe whats written in the Sustainable Energy - without the hot air reference we have all agreed is excellent. Here are some simple starts:

The total storage reservoir surface area of the UK's existing 20-30GWh of pumped storage is approximately 6 square kilometres, the total area of standing water in the UK is around 2000 square kilometres. This is before you consider the building of dams or purpose specific reservoirs.

From that its believable that you could fit the above discussed 4000GWh of energy (enough to ride through several days of zero generation from other sources) into reservoirs covering 1200 square kilometres, with the UK totalling over 200,000 square kilometres this is only 0.5% of the land area of the UK.

Tidal pool, thermal, and other storage techniques could contribute further without using land area.

Feel free to come up with numbers or references to show how these are impossibilities, because every analysis I see on pumped storage adds up.

As you will note, I was dismissing your point about UK cliffs being suitable for pumped storage. We notice you have not repeated that claim.

[tggzzz]

There's another small issue with building anything on top of an English cliff, most of them are collapsing into the sea on a regular basis

I'll modify that just a little. Once upon a time they were hills, ripples left over from when Africa hit Europe. But the hills gradually collapsed into the sea - thereby forming the cliffs.

Either way, they are useless for pumped storage.

Well, the cliffs aren't entirely useless. If you step back a kilometre from the cliff edge you are far enough away that the crumble rate won't get you in trouble for a fair while, the land can probably support the weight of the damed pool, and the pipe losses aren't astronomic. The vertical displacement is certainly going to be a lot less than ideal. However, the main issues is that land is heavily populated. To build a circular dammed structure large enough to be useful, even if you make the pool inside it quite deep to minimise its width, is going to require displacing a lot of people. This is definitely a high impact project idea.

And, of course building such a circular dam structure with a hill in the middle is not exactly efficient! It would be better to build on flat land, e.g. East Anglia

[dannyf]

The total storage reservoir surface area of the UK's existing 20-30GWh of pumped storage is approximately 6 square kilometres

Even if math is not your strong suit, you should probably do some math - it is fairly simple, btw - to do a sanity check on those numbers.

I am sure the water and land in the UK are much holier, but the largest such facility in the world generates 3GW, and takes up 5 million square meters - compare with your figures.

BTW, that facility was built in a remote area, in the 1980s, at a then cost of $1.6Bn.

I would conservatively estimate that such a facility, if it were to be built in the UK today, would cost you well over $10Bn, assuming that you can overcome the political pressure and environmental approvals.

Again, being able to think critical and not taking other peole's BS wholesale helps.

[dannyf]

Is that a troll?

I don't know - I think s/he sounded that s/he genuinely believed in it.

You know, for some people, winning a virtual argument is so important to them that they will throw anything, no matter how far fetched, as long as they stick. This could be one of those (nut) cases.

[Someone]

The total storage reservoir surface area of the UK's existing 20-30GWh of pumped storage is approximately 6 square kilometres

Even if math is not your strong suit, you should probably do some math - it is fairly simple, btw - to do a sanity check on those numbers.

I am sure the water and land in the UK are much holier, but the largest such facility in the world generates 3GW, and takes up 5 million square meters - compare with your figures.

BTW, that facility was built in a remote area, in the 1980s, at a then cost of $1.6Bn.

I would conservatively estimate that such a facility, if it were to be built in the UK today, would cost you well over $10Bn, assuming that you can overcome the political pressure and environmental approvals.

Again, being able to think critical and not taking other peole's BS wholesale helps.

Bath County Pumped Storage Station?
It stores 45GWh of energy in the upper reservoir of 1 square kilometre, roughly 10 times more efficient per unit area of land than the existing UK pumped storage fleet. Perhaps I should revise the above estimate for the total area in the UK needed to store 4000GWh down by a factor of 10?

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 5 square kilometres, but even with that estimate that counts an area larger than both reservoirs its still a factor of 2 more land area efficient than the current UK fleet.

Read the papers I have linked, they look at the current costs of building storage and estimate a comparable 50,000 ML system to cost several billion dollars to build around 2 billion.

For comparison a nuclear power plant with the same peak generation capacity would cost around 12 billion, a combined cycle gas plant would cost 3 billion, a coal plant interestingly has capital costs higher at around 8 billion. Multiple references come to similar numbers, these are not picking biased estimates but looking across a range of well referenced data sets.

Adding in the capital costs of both pumped storage and wind or solar generation together in a system to deliver reliable and consistent power year round, the magic number is on par with coal or nuclear just for the capital costs. The lower annual operating expenses and marginal cost of the power delivering much higher returns on investment compared to the conventional plants.

Having lower ongoing costs than any of those alternative generators and a marginal cost of the power orders of magnitude lower, lower capital costs for peaking plants, why is this discussion continuing?

[Someone]

Feel free to come up with numbers or references to show how these are impossibilities, because every analysis I see on pumped storage adds up.

As you will note, I was dismissing your point about UK cliffs being suitable for pumped storage. We notice you have not repeated that claim.

Show us how much of the UK land area is unsuitable for storage installations, perhaps with references etc. Because from the numbers I have just shown the required space to have this 4000GWh of storage is less than one percent of the total land area.

[Someone]

There's another small issue with building anything on top of an English cliff, most of them are collapsing into the sea on a regular basis

I'll modify that just a little. Once upon a time they were hills, ripples left over from when Africa hit Europe. But the hills gradually collapsed into the sea - thereby forming the cliffs.

Either way, they are useless for pumped storage.

Well, the cliffs aren't entirely useless. If you step back a kilometre from the cliff edge you are far enough away that the crumble rate won't get you in trouble for a fair while, the land can probably support the weight of the damed pool, and the pipe losses aren't astronomic. The vertical displacement is certainly going to be a lot less than ideal. However, the main issues is that land is heavily populated. To build a circular dammed structure large enough to be useful, even if you make the pool inside it quite deep to minimise its width, is going to require displacing a lot of people. This is definitely a high impact project idea.

And, of course building such a circular dam structure with a hill in the middle is not exactly efficient! It would be better to build on flat land, e.g. East Anglia

Where as a dam that includes the local topography as part of its walls reduces the construction expense (as in the example of the upper reservoir of the Dinorwig). Once again uneconomic corner cases and illogical examples can be found for any technology, this does not make them stupid or uneconomic when applied carefully.

For someone accusing others of creating strawman arguments you should really be more considerate.

[dannyf]

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 5 square kilometres

If you cannot convert million square meters to square killo meters in your head - the math is really simple, I can assure you, you can still use online calculators for that.

[Someone]

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 5 square kilometres

If you cannot convert million square meters to square killo meters in your head - the math is really simple, I can assure you, you can still use online calculators for that.

Wikipedia states the surface areas for the upper and lower storage reservoirs as 265 acres and 555 acres respectively, 3.3 square kilometres.

I've counted the upper reservoirs above as the energy is stored there, if you want to consider the scaremongering corner case of delivering power solely from pumped storage then the lower reservoir capacity is simply another body of stored energy to be consumed.

[Someone]

Maybe you can learn to graduate from "wikipedia"? All it requires is your commitment to the truth, even if it goes against your ideology.

You may be able to learn a thing or two in the process.

even with that estimate that counts an area larger than both reservoirs its still a factor of 2 more land area efficient than the current UK fleet.

Put in all the numbers you like, I can't come up with evidence to show that pumped storage in the UK is either uneconomic or impossible even when considering the extreme case of 4000GWh. Seems you can't either.

So far it seems my maths is sound, and walking on the side of overestimating the costs.

[dannyf]

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[tggzzz]

There's another small issue with building anything on top of an English cliff, most of them are collapsing into the sea on a regular basis

I'll modify that just a little. Once upon a time they were hills, ripples left over from when Africa hit Europe. But the hills gradually collapsed into the sea - thereby forming the cliffs.

Either way, they are useless for pumped storage.

Well, the cliffs aren't entirely useless. If you step back a kilometre from the cliff edge you are far enough away that the crumble rate won't get you in trouble for a fair while, the land can probably support the weight of the damed pool, and the pipe losses aren't astronomic. The vertical displacement is certainly going to be a lot less than ideal. However, the main issues is that land is heavily populated. To build a circular dammed structure large enough to be useful, even if you make the pool inside it quite deep to minimise its width, is going to require displacing a lot of people. This is definitely a high impact project idea.

And, of course building such a circular dam structure with a hill in the middle is not exactly efficient! It would be better to build on flat land, e.g. East Anglia

Where as a dam that includes the local topography as part of its walls reduces the construction expense (as in the example of the upper reservoir of the Dinorwig). Once again uneconomic corner cases and illogical examples can be found for any technology, this does not make them stupid or uneconomic when applied carefully.

That's true of course. But if you look at the topography of your "famous cliffs", you'll notice that they will all require such a stupid structure.

It would help if you could give names to your "famous cliffs" that you feel would be suitable. Since you probably don't have Ordnance Survey maps to hand in Australia, I suggest you look at http://www.streetmap.com for 1:50000 and 1:25000 scale maps.

[Someone]

So far it seems my maths is sound,

I'm sure that's the case, just as your "famous cliff" ideal,

I would nominate that to be EEVBLOG joke of the week?

But it is only middle of the week so you have a good chance outdoing yourself before Saturday,

Some cliffs will be suitable sitings for pumped storage and some won't, where it the outrageous statement in that? Its disputing the claim that the UK is dead flat and does not have enough mountainous regions to support such a scale of pumped storage Trying to claim all the seaside cliffs are impossible to site pumped storage on is the ridiculous claim, just as claiming that all the cliff tops would/should be used for pumped storage. Both ridiculous statements.

But finding some sites across the UK totalling less than 1% of the land area, which are suitable for pumped storage. That sounds like something that would be trivial given the experiences in Australia leveraging geospatial data to algorithmically find candidate sites.

[Someone]

That's true of course. But if you look at the topography of your "famous cliffs", you'll notice that they will all require such a stupid structure.

Storage reservoirs come in all sorts of sizes, they can be fitted into the existing terrain.

It would help if you could give names to your "famous cliffs" that you feel would be suitable. Since you probably don't have Ordnance Survey maps to hand in Australia, I suggest you look at http://www.streetmap.com for 1:50000 and 1:25000 scale maps.

So far we've heard claims that the UK is so very flat and all the areas below sea level (incidentally a great place to have pumped storage lower reservoir), but this is against the numbers I have presented showing that less than 0.5% of the land area is needed in storage reservoirs. You can't find a tiny fraction of the total land area that is suitable?

Its easy for you to continue to find the negative examples but you are doing nothing to show how there are not enough feasible locations.

[coppice]

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 5 square kilometres

If you cannot convert million square meters to square killo meters in your head - the math is really simple, I can assure you, you can still use online calculators for that.

I don't know how either of you get your figures. There's 107ha of surface area in the upper pool and 255ha of surface area in the lower pool for a total of 3.62 square kilometres. Is the 5 square kilometre figure when you include the supporting area of dam walls and so on? I didn't see figures for that in the descriptions I found of the Bath County project.

[Someone]

I'm not sure how you arrive at the 5 square kilometres

If you cannot convert million square meters to square killo meters in your head - the math is really simple, I can assure you, you can still use online calculators for that.

I don't know how either of you get your figures. There's 107ha of surface area in the upper pool and 255ha of surface area in the lower pool for a total of 3.62 square kilometres. Is the 5 square kilometre figure when you include the supporting area of dam walls and so on? I didn't see figures for that in the descriptions I found of the Bath County project.

That tallies with the numbers I put up for the upper reservoir, and close enough for the area of the lower reservoir. However you cut these figures its a much more effective use of space than the UK plants, though that may be at an increase in capital outlay per unit of energy stored when you consider its price.

[dannyf]

You can't find a tiny fraction of the total land area that is suitable?

Should you be looking that total area of the "famous cliffs"? Or you have abandoned that "cliff" ideal of yours?

Its easy for you to continue to find the negative examples but you are doing nothing to show how there are not enough feasible locations.

So in you mind, if I am unwilling to prove that your crazy ideal is crazy enough to your definition/satisfaction, it is no longer crazy?

[dannyf]

I didn't see figures for that in the descriptions I found of the Bath County project.

There is a recreation area. That along pushes the number to 5 million square meters.

plus areas in between the ponds - you can get a sense by watching its relative size vs. the ponds.