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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @11:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the won't-it-float? dept.

Pumped storage is a decades-old technology with a relatively simple concept: When electricity is cheap and plentiful, use it to pump water up into a reservoir above a turbine, and when electricity is scarce and expensive, send that pumped water down through a turbine to generate more power. Often, these pumped storage facilities are auxiliary to other electricity-generating systems, and they serve to smooth out fluctuations in the amount of power on the grid.

A German research institute has spent years trying to tailor pumped storage to ocean environments. Recently, the institute completed a successful four-week pilot test using a hollow concrete sphere that it placed on the bottom of Lake Constance, a body of water at the foot of the Alps. The sphere has a diameter of three meters and contains a pump and a turbine. Much like traditional pumped storage, when electricity is cheap, water can be pumped out of the sphere, and when it's scarce, water can be let into the sphere to move the turbine and generate electricity.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Engineering envisions spheres with inner diameters of 30m, placed 700m (or about 2,300 ft) underwater. Assuming the spheres would be fitted with existing 5 MW turbines that could function at that depth, the researchers estimate that each sphere would offer 20 MWh of storage with four hours discharge time.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/german-institute-successfully-tests-underwater-energy-storage-sphere/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:18PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:18PM (#476435)

    Is it any different than pumped storage with a 700m difference between reservoirs?

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:39PM (#476445)

    yes. you don't have to drag the water through 700m of pipe.
    and I am being serious.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Snospar on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:39PM

    by Snospar (5366) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:39PM (#476481)

    One of the main downsides to pumped storage is the necessity to build dams and flood valleys often destroying vital wild animal habitat and almost always wrecking the view that was previously "unspoilt" countryside.

    Here the nasty (but essential) machinery can be hidden under the sea - hopefully with little to no impact on the surrounding marine ecology. And getting storage closer to the wind turbines, in the case of off-shore wind farms, probably has other benefits... well apart from the power being in the wrong place but off-shore already has that issue to contend with.

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