As green energy begins to work, how to store the kilowatts? In water batteries.
A rule of environmental progress: what seems expensive today will seem a bargain tomorrow.
Let me start by saying – if you are going to read one article about “pumped storage,” read this one.
The subject may seem obscure, but is essential if we are to move beyond the stage of doomsday-or-denial claims about climate change, to the stage of practical solutions that maintain standards of living without more global warming.
Renewable energy is starting to work – globally, solar electricity production increased almost 50 percent last year. Hydropower dominates the green categories, but solar and wind are rising notably. This makes “pumped storage” a necessity.
A few thematic points:
First: Some who own vacation homes and fly in private jets benefit, via money or power, by denouncing fossil fuels. But it’s a pipe dream that fossil fuels are going away, at least over the next few decades. Even if it were possible to eliminate fossil use in the short term, it would be irresponsible, because the poor would suffer 10,000 times more than the rich.
Second: Green and low-carbon energy are increasing in practicality and affordability. Over the medium term, by, say the next few decades, renewables will get bigger while the fossil sector gets smaller.
Renewable power is going to work as society’s counter to greenhouse gases. We’re not doomed! Renewables will work.
Third: Nuclear and hydro are renewables. There is no solution to climate change that does not involve an increase in both. Those who say “Fossil fuels are bad but I don’t like hydro or nuclear either” are not realists.
In the United States and European Union, nuclear energy has done no harm to public health, while thousands die each year from coal-caused pollution and in coal mining, oil drilling and oil refining accidents.
Some say, “Hydropower facilities alter nature.” The alteration is creation of a lake. Nature makes and unmakes lakes all the time.
Quebec has almost no carbon emissions from power generation, because the province’s electricity comes from hydro.
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