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I’ve posted a lot on Pumped Storage energy facilities (Big Batteries) – in particular about the Ludington , Michigan, Pumped Storage facility on the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan. Above is a pretty good example of the “Youtube” travelogue genre, with “The Restless Viking” giving a nice walking tour of the facility, including the rarely noted historical fact that this power station, and others like it, were built in the 1970s, long before solar and wind were a thing on the grid – in order to provide back-up storage for a generation of large nuclear plants. Nuclear plants needed energy storage, because they are not good at ramping up and down when energy demand is lower. They need to run flat out all the time to be efficient, much less safe and reliable. Pumped storage facilities could store unneeded power, say at 3 am on a sunday morning, and release it during peak use hours later in the day. With the advent of utility scale wind and solar, the facility has been upgraded with new turbines for a whole new technological age. It was the biggest of its kind when first built – it is now, I believe, the 4th largest pumped storage in the world, with a “pond” 2.5 miles across and 1 mile wide. Below, another description from then Consumers Energy CEO Patty Poppe.
Newest thinking on pumped storage recognizes that surface sites like this one on incredibly valuable and ecologically critical sites will not be feasible in the future. What does work is revamping existing, abandoned mine sites, such as exist aplenty in Michigan’s UP, across upper Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain region.
Creating a system that shifts water between upper mine chambers to store gravitational energy as water, then letting it fall to release that energy, opens up vast new storage capacity that is already sited, already served with transmission and transportation links. Roman Sedortsov of Michigan Technological University is a leader in this area.
