> There are not, in fact, a limited number of pumped storage sites, and you do not, in fact, need any alpine lakes. Dikes are not commonly made of concrete.
There are a limited number of economically viable pumped storage sites. You can find papers claiming an effectively limitless amount of hydroelectric storage. The problem is that most of these places either already use dams for most of their energy production and thus don't need to build any storage. Or, they are in extremely remote areas where construction is prohibitively expensive. There's huge hydroelectric potential in Tibet. But that's incredibly remote and prohibitively expensive to develop.
> And, there are numerous other cheap alternative storage media, for places without hills.
> I was always wondering why there are no systems converting the unused electricity in potential energy by moving water to a higher ground
There are a bunch of pumped storage facilities around [1]. But they work best at massive scale, so suitable locations are somewhat limited. Plus they are expensive to build and often face environmental protests (similar to building dams). Still, it's a solution I'm a fan of.
> why pumped storage is actually not going to work, or why we don't have more of it already
(1) Requires a lot of land. (2) It needs a height difference, at the required scale prohibitively expensive to make an artificial one. (3) Requires lots of water.
I don't think there are very many places that pumped hydro can be built, where it hasn't been built. You also need quite the significant height difference for it to be meaningfull.
Unless you count pumped storage, in which case it has.
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