As I pulled down the unit's door and locked it I began to make calculations in my head how much I could get for the women inside it.
Pumped storage is a type of hydroelectric energy storage that stores water to a reservoir, and generates power by flowing the water downstream to another reservoir that is lower the first one. This could be useful in Timberborn when there are long droughts and use of beavers and/or windmills arent enough.
I’ve read on here that there is a design used so that a water dumper and pumper placed on opposite ends, inbetween them some mills, can generate power. So what i was thinking was that this design can be scaled up enough to make opposite ends big enough to become reservoirs.
Has anyone tried this yet? Do you think this would be an efficient source of power for the beavers during droughts? Let me know what you think
Refs.:
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https://www.energy-storage.news/californias-critical-long-duration-electricity-storage-requirement-needs-to-be-planned-for/
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https://www.intertek.com/blog/2017-10-06-grid-scale-energy/
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https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pumped-hydro-moves-to-retain-storage-market-leadership
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https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/31/lithium-battery-costs-have-fallen-by-98-in-three-decades
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https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-cost/
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https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2020/Dec/Making-Green-Hydrogen-a-Cost-Competitive-Climate-Solution
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https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/global-green-hydrogen-pipeline-exceeds-250gw-heres-the-27-largest-gigawatt-scale-projects/2-1-933755
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https://x.company/projects/foghorn
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https://web.archive.org/web/20130921055300/http://www.intpowertechcorp.com/ASME-IMECE-12-87097-FINAL-30Jul12-C.pdf
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http://www.leightyfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/lces-2012-guangzhou-21oct.pdf
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https://ibb.co/fkNNLgR
I feel hydropower and pumped storage are very important to complement renewable green energy. What are the companies active in this sector? PSU's NHPC and SJVN seem to be the largest players in this area.
Hydrogen is lighter than air, and you don't need to waste energy pumping oxygen uphill. So the idea is that you split the water into hydrogen and oxygen (using solar or wind), pump the hydrogen uphill, generate electricity with a fuel cell (or some other use of hydrogen where it reacts with oxygen), condense the water up top, and then let the water flow downhill through a turbine.
You definitely can't make a perpetual motion machine out of hydrogen going uphill because the GPE you can generate small mass of water you generate is dwarfed by the amount of energy going into the process, so even minor inefficiencies in the electrolyser and fuel cell remove the benefit.
However I can't remember from fluid mechanics how much energy would be saved by pumping hydrogen instead of liquid water, especially given one is a gas and one is a liquid. Hydrogen is less than 12% the mass of water, and you can get 60% efficient fuel cells and 80% efficient electrolyers - so only 52% energy lost. So at a glance I'm not sure why it's a dumb idea.
Would it be worth it to pump hydrogen instead of water from an energy perspective?
I feel hydropower and pumped storage are very important to complement renewable green energy. What are the companies active in this sector? PSU's NHPC and SJVN seem to be the largest players in this area.
