Pumped-storage hydro dam schemes to store wind energy (Scotland)

[Muz]

That said he is entitled to his opinion.

Indeed.

If members could please remember that, this is a public forum where reasoned debate & discussion is to be encouraged, regardless of your opinions of the op. Name calling and personal rebukes are counter productive, and against forum policy.

[245dlc]

Correct me if I am wrong but when I was at school a pumped storage scheme generated electricity at peak times for high demand, and used cheaper off peak electricity to pump the water back up again, or at least what could not be replenished natutally by natural precipitation.

Why the need for more blooming wind turbines ?

Also a have a pal who has put a huge turbine up in his front field, on his farm... said it cost him a £million, and he said it turns day and night, and over the last two years it only stopped turning for 2 days in all that time, so again ? why the need for more wind turbines, if they are properly sited, which all gets checked out before they are built, they'll hardly ever stop turning, so if thats the case why the need for a pump storage scheme aswell for that matter ?

And who wants to go to a scenic place only to find a landscape littered with wind turbines? And if those lakes are naturally fresh water you'll end up killing off all the natural plants and animals that were there in the first place, and with Europe being so full of tree huggers and leaf lickers they'll never allow such a ridiculous idea.

[Peter Dow]

Firstly welcome to the forum Peter and thank you for sharing you thoughts. This is an interesting project you propose but I haven't found anything in the proposal to deal with the serious concentrated weight of 400,000,000 tons of water.

What, the weight of water on the bedrock underneath, the same bedrock that already supports the upper parts of Coire Glas?

As it happens, the 138 million cubic metres of rock I'd like to excavate to level out the reservoir bed weigh about the same as the 400 million cubic metres of water in the reservoir.

However, with the water flowing in and out it will be a varying weight on the bedrock as opposed to the constant weight that it replaces, so there will be more of a compression / decompression cyclic load and whatever effect that has on the bedrock.

Very often you find that materials under a constant load hold out no problem but when subject to a cyclic load suffer fatigue failure.

The thing is Stock that the Scottish mountains have endured all kinds of the most extreme loading over millions of years - earthquakes stronger then anything ever experienced by man in Scotland, volcanic intrusion and massive glaciers moving on top of them. So it is not as if Coire Glas has not seen some very violent compression and decompression in its time.

I think we'll find that the water will not be able to do any more damage to the bedrock than it has already suffered but I don't know for sure.

If you meant the weight of the water on the dam then dams this size have been built before now, but again I suppose not all huge dams will have reservoirs which completely fill and empty quite so frequently as a pumped-storage dam does. So again the cyclic loading could well be extreme for a dam and that may mean building in extra strength to the dam to take account of that.

The next item I raise is the levelling of the floor of the basin, would the additional capacity be cost effective?. Material for the construction of the dam?

Considering this pumped-storage facility will be in use for decades, generations, goodness knows how long, it is cost effective when you spread out the cost over all the years it will be in use. But it will take a government with a government's long-term view of financing an economic infrastructure project to fund it.

Now this type of project was proposed here two years ago but the .5billion of an inter connector to start with helped to put paid to it,

That's interesting. Do you have a link to the topic? Certainly a 12 GW power station of any kind is going to need 12GW power lines to it and that has to be part of the budget for the project.

Many smaller distributed pumped storage schemes situated beside the wind farms would not require so much expensive power lines but you can't always find a suitable site for a pumped-storage scheme where your wind farms are.

then the sale of the electricity are people or industry going to pay a premium because it is green?

I think most of the cost of constructing such pumped-storage schemes should be paid for by government. You could ask the power companies and their customers to pay for the turbines or for the maintenance of the turbines at least but the cost of those would not be more than other forms of "non-green" electricity generation who also need to buy and run turbines.

What would the payback projection be for such a project?

Well in future as fossil fuels run out and become more expensive then the payback is that your renewable energy is cheaper for your electricity. In the long term, renewables might be cheaper than fossil fuel even at today's prices, if you spread the cost of investment in renewables out over all the years your renewable infrastructure lasts.

Another different argument is if the CO2 pollution fossil fuel burning causes creates severe environmental damage - global warming I am thinking of - then you might see not only carbon-taxes or levies making renewables cheaper - but even I suppose the eventual outlawing of excessive use of fossil fuels so we might have no choice one day but to use renewable energy?

the other thing needed to be considered is " if this level of investment was put in to biogeneration ie willow,straw, biomass or timber then it will generate the need for a workforce labour this creates local economies and increases the tax take. buildings will be put up, equipment purchased etc, etc.

Your project will only create a labour demand for the construction stage but very little afterwards..............
Just my thoughts on the subject.

Stock

Well there's always plenty of work needing doing, assuming that the government runs the economy competently of course. If there is an incompetent government, like now, there is always the job of changing our foolish politicians for other less foolish ones.

[Peter Dow]

I have been trying and trying but i just cant get my head round how he thinks he can get something like this off the ground with what seems like no previous building experience

Quest TV. Enough said.

and no money to even get him to the site never mind build the thing!

As you typed yourself

its not hard to find out .... with the power of google!!

So I've already had a good look around the site of Coire Glas and around Loch Lochy using Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street views.

[Peter Dow]

So come on Peter .. if youve nothing to do with the industry, who put this idea in your head ? or what made you come up with it ?

I was just inspired by the SSE hydro dam proposal for Coire Glas and I felt compelled by an overwhelming desire to put "pen to paper" (although it is all done on PC these days) to bring forth my vision of a bigger, better scheme there.

Although I may not have done anything like this before I do have experience of acquiring most of the skills and knowledge that I needed and it was not too hard to find out things I didn't have at my finger-tips immediately.

Google and wikipedia filled-in most of the gaps.

I have spent a life-time bettering myself, education wise, and I don't hesitate to say if I think I know better in my political activities, so I am a "can do" type person if the task in hand is something I believe in and I believe in this vision I had.

[Peter Dow]

Well , I see the storage area for the water,

Do you? I wonder. Maybe you are looking at the wrong thing, just thinking that you are looking at the upper reservoir?

If you truly see it, you'll be looking at the hill called "Coire Glas".

but i see no power station

The power station gets built inside an underground complex, built into the hillside.

and i guess more importantly no catch dam to return the water back to the top dam.

Yes well the "catch dam" or lower reservoir is to be Loch Lochy and Loch Arkaig.

Can't you see the lochs in this image? Can't you see Coire Glas, at the top?

I would imagine pumping water back up hill is going to take an incredable amount of power .

Yes if you want to pump back up hill at full power that'll be something like 12GW. It takes more energy to pump up than you get back out - you only get back about 75% of what you put in. So it is not a source of energy - the wind turbines are the source of energy - this is just an energy store.

If you click to read this page on Wikipedia it'll explain many of the basics of pumped storage.


Wikipedia: Pumped-storage hydroelectricity

[Peter Dow]

Correct me if I am wrong but when I was at school a pumped storage scheme generated electricity at peak times for high demand, and used cheaper off peak electricity to pump the water back up again, or at least what could not be replenished natutally by natural precipitation.

Yes, although I am proposing new pumped-storage to complement all the new wind turbines that'll be being installed in the next few years.

Why the need for more blooming wind turbines ?

It's a good source of renewable energy.

Also a have a pal who has put a huge turbine up in his front field, on his farm... said it cost him a £million, and he said it turns day and night, and over the last two years it only stopped turning for 2 days in all that time, so again ? why the need for more wind turbines, if they are properly sited, which all gets checked out before they are built, they'll hardly ever stop turning, so if thats the case why the need for a pump storage scheme aswell for that matter ?

Well wind turbines do have a variable power output. They turn at different speeds according to how strong the wind blows and there are times of calm of next to no wind and that's when you need your pumped storage to keep the power coming.

I thought that video I posted above was pretty self-explanatory. I am surprised you don't "get it" after watching that.

I doubt I could explain it better in words than that video does with moving images.

[Peter Dow]

And who wants to go to a scenic place only to find a landscape littered with wind turbines?

Well maybe not you but others won't mind at all.

And if those lakes are naturally fresh water you'll end up killing off all the natural plants and animals that were there in the first place,

Only fresh water is used in this scheme. That video was for schemes in Ireland where they are planning to use sea water.

Fresh water from the lochs is pumped uphill into Coire Glas and then it flows back down into the lochs.

I think the diagram showing the drain to the sea may be confusing you. That drain is just to drain off excess fresh water from the lochs into the sea to prevent flooding. No water from the sea is ever pumped back up that drain. It is a one-way drain. That diagram doesn't show the upper reservoir in Coire Glas at all. You might be getting confused thinking Loch Arkaig is the upper reservoir. It isn't. Coire Glas is the upper reservoir. Loch Arkaig is the lower reservoir and so is Loch Lochy.

I hope that is clear now.

and with Europe being so full of tree huggers and leaf lickers they'll never allow such a ridiculous idea.

Well we need to take action to defend ourselves from any such extreme tree-hugging types. I am thinking here of all the tree-huggers in Victoria State, Australia, who were fining people for cutting the bush back around their houses to make fire-breaks in case of a bush fire. Well we know what happened - no fire breaks meant the houses caught fire and people burned to death.

The problem in Australia was that the Australians didn't have a government and a head of state who allowed them to defy the tree huggers and create fire-breaks without being fined or jailed for it. It wasn't Europe to blame - it was Her Majesty's governments of Victoria State, Australia and Her Majesty's federal government of Australia.

Over there, like here, the kingdom's TV puts up royalist politicians of all types, but few republicans, for people to vote for and then the officers of the kingdom do what they like, that the politicians want, and we the people are just subjects with no rights. They can fine us, jail us, and we have no defence, no-one to stick up for our rights.

I think the solution is electing a president of a republic who will defend people's rights to make ourselves safe but there again that's maybe because I am a republican.

[Peter Dow]

"Dow" equation for the power and energy output of a wind farm.

"Dow" equation for the power and energy output of a wind farm.

"The power and energy of a wind farm is proportional to (the square root of the wind farm area) times the rotor diameter".

In his book which was mentioned to me on another forum and so I had a look, David MacKay wrote that the power / energy of a wind farm was independent of rotor size which didn't seem right to me considering the trend to increasing wind turbine size.

Now I think the commercial wind-turbine manufacturing companies know better and very possibly someone else has derived this equation independently of me and long ago - in which case by all means step in and tell me whose equation this is.

Or if you've not see this wind farm power/energy equation before, then see if you can figure out my derivation!

[ianoz]

Peter , It is good to see you coming back and trying to answer the questions asked .In regards to my questions about catch dam to return the water ,your google maps show no elevations ,and not being a native of Scotland I know little of the area .. It seems to me that Loch Arkaig .would need its capasity increased to hold the extra water released into it . Raising its height to catch and store the water for returning to the systemi would imagine would reduce the pressore head on the water lowering the generation output .. Verifiable figures are needed . What the the volume of water released per hour .What is the size and capasity of the pumps required toget the water back up and the time needed to pump rge water . How much power is needed to run these pumps .How many wind generatorsw are required to preduce the power ..Some how i think by the time all the costs are added up It will be far too expensive., for the people of Scotland to Pay for ..The way i understand AC power is that it can not be stored , Find a solution to that <You will make a name for your self .
I know here in Australia The Snowy Mountains Scheme took over 20 years to complete ..Basicly .In witer there is snow formed on the mountains .Spring snow melts and goes into storeage dams Hydro power is generated ,.Posible then goes though another power station . Water is then send though the mountains to the dry inland and used to irrigate crops / Then next winter it snows again .
The greenies Hate it because it has supposedly killed the snowy river .. Same Greenies Rant and rave every time that undamed rivers put topsoil and nutrients though floods onto the great barrier reef .

[JD450A]

The trouble is you are taking a "just about" cost effective form of renewable energy, then taking it and removing the benifits by changing the state of the energy 5 times at least.... each time you can expect to loose power, that's without mentioning the loss due to friction. this loss is what would happily kill it.

there are much more cost effective and reliable ways to generate power. tidal and waste to energy are two very good ones. your's I'm afraid is far too large and under engineered.

[B4D2USA]

Although I may not have done anything like this before I do have experience of acquiring most of the skills and knowledge that I needed and it was not too hard to find out things I didn't have at my finger-tips immediately.

Google and wikipedia filled-in most of the gaps.

I have spent a life-time bettering myself, education wise, and I don't hesitate to say if I think I know better in my political activities, so I am a "can do" type person if the task in hand is something I believe in and I believe in this vision I had.

Oh dear, if this is your claim to knowledge, I fear this scheme is doomed from the start. Peter, most of the folks who frequent these sites have been active members of the construction industry, whether it be light residential or heavy industrial/civil engineering works. The experience these people have garnered over the cumulative years far outweighs anything that you can learn from such varied and questionable websites that Google can lead you to, or Wikipedia can offer. Without a solid start as an engineering trained mind and multiple years of experience, I very highly doubt that you have the skills to compose such a masterpiece. We all have "common-sense" mind wanderings that lead us to think the impossible to be a doable task. At the end of the day, however, someone of higher knowledge or experience will lead you to the path of truthfulness. There is nothing wrong with challenging the status-quo, but the challenge really needs to be rooted in reality. I also understand that there are some who may be called "quacks" by thinking the unthinkable, afterall, we all were led to believe the earth was flat and that man couldn't fly, but those theories were proven wrong. A dose of reality can be earned by having actual experience in these fields. Ask anyone of us, or anyone from other forums, and they will all give you opinions of engineers and architects that are most often far from glowing. Book smart does not equal superior knowledge until you try to apply your theories in real life/real time. "Can-do" hardly fits the bill in this scale of project.



Nonetheless, what I see is a re-think of the perpetual motion machine that is an impossibility by today's technical understandings. Pumping water uphill to generate electricity by gravity-fed turbines is a net-zero or net-negative scenario. If you augment the electric power from wind turbines, it still doesn't matter. Why not just use the electric from the turbines to supply the power? A waste of time, materials and energy are the end result of your scheme to which there is no foreseeable payback.

P.S. Naming these schemes the "Dow" this or the "Dow" that also puts question to your intent. Truly an inspired mind or just another somebody looking for fame and fortune?

[JD450A]

I gleen all my technical knolage from canadians.....

http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/inf...onal-update-ii

[Dan]

Oh dear, if this is your claim to knowledge, I fear this scheme is doomed from the start. Peter, most of the folks who frequent these sites have been active members of the construction industry, whether it be light residential or heavy industrial/civil engineering works. The experience these people have garnered over the cumulative years far outweighs anything that you can learn from such varied and questionable websites that Google can lead you to, or Wikipedia can offer. Without a solid start as an engineering trained mind and multiple years of experience, I very highly doubt that you have the skills to compose such a masterpiece. We all have "common-sense" mind wanderings that lead us to think the impossible to be a doable task. At the end of the day, however, someone of higher knowledge or experience will lead you to the path of truthfulness. There is nothing wrong with challenging the status-quo, but the challenge really needs to be rooted in reality. I also understand that there are some who may be called "quacks" by thinking the unthinkable, afterall, we all were led to believe the earth was flat and that man couldn't fly, but those theories were proven wrong. A dose of reality can be earned by having actual experience in these fields. Ask anyone of us, or anyone from other forums, and they will all give you opinions of engineers and architects that are most often far from glowing. Book smart does not equal superior knowledge until you try to apply your theories in real life/real time. "Can-do" hardly fits the bill in this scale of project.



Nonetheless, what I see is a re-think of the perpetual motion machine that is an impossibility by today's technical understandings. Pumping water uphill to generate electricity by gravity-fed turbines is a net-zero or net-negative scenario. If you augment the electric power from wind turbines, it still doesn't matter. Why not just use the electric from the turbines to supply the power? A waste of time, materials and energy are the end result of your scheme to which there is no foreseeable payback.

P.S. Naming these schemes the "Dow" this or the "Dow" that also puts question to your intent. Truly an inspired mind or just another somebody looking for fame and fortune?

Top post , I cant disagree with any of that, at all Bruce. Perhaps Peter can improve his plans from this sort of input , because lets face it we are all looking for the perfect answers when it comes to energy conservation and generation, regardless of who we are or where we come from.

Scotland is certainly suited to certain types of generation, I, like many of you are, am still sceptical of their environmental impacts however.

Where do we draw the line between power generation and environmental damage? I suppose you could argue nuclear is the worst of all in some respects, but it doesent scar the whole country with turbines or dams ? ...but its legacy last for years all the same....... difficult one

[JD450A]

Nuclear is a tricky issue, and IMHO should not be used in britian due to the byproducts.... saftey means faf all as france has a shite load of them and one of them spewing radiation will do britian in.... but britain has no where to dump the crap....

Solar is a pile of shite. Sick of seeing these damn farms now as they blot the landscape like hell.

Wind is nice and I think the turbines look cool and blend in nice, tbh I don't see why dartmoors not full of them, we have roads dams and claypits....

Hydro and tidal power is my favriout... not on a mass scale but lots of small units.... the screw type I like alot.....