Steven Hayward, the conservative scholar who blogs at Power Line, notes California's problems with so-called "green energy" being produced at the "wrong times of day" when demand is low. It is being essentially discarded. Oops.
And he notes the folks there who manage the power grid have no way to store power produced at noon for use that night when people get home from work. Batteries are both too expensive and too limited in capacity (and generally too "Chinese" as well).
I know a solution that's far from new. Anywhere there is a reservoir in the mountains with power generation at the downstream end, you can set up a way to store power. By using the midday excess power to pump water back uphill into the reservoir, from where it can be flowed back down through the turbines when needed as dusk and beyond. Actually the same water can be recycled over and over.
Electricity is difficult and costly to store. Water is both cheap and easy to store. Anytime you pump water uphill you store energy which your hydroelectric system is already designed and built to convert back to electricity whenever you open the penstocks.
There is no reason green power and hydro power cannot work together. We need to get busy building the forebays, new pumping stations and uphill pipelines needed to add this power storage capacity to all existing hydro power facilities.
