With Aquabank, power is created by water dropping 600 meters into the earth to run turbines. The water is then stored and pumped back up during the night when rates are less or via wind power.
Tip CleanTechnica
Underground power generated from water
3 Comments
Leave a Reply
(However sometimes the anti-spam programs here go awry. Email us if your comments seem to vanish into the void.)
Uh.. hate to mention this, but it’s not really generation. It’s really more of a storage system. The first time it’s generating, but after that it’s essentially storing the energy used to pull the water back up the the surface. It’s time-shifting at best.
Not to mention the need to keep the water clean, top the water off, etc. Unless you are tapping into an existing river or stream, in which case you have to deal with what happens if that river runs low or has bio-issues of it’s own.
Not the worst way I’ve heard of to store energy, but let’s call it what it is.
Their plan is to pump back up at night when rates are less or use wind power at night to create the pumping power. I agree, it’s kind of a weird plan.
Actually it sounds pretty brilliant– but as Woody points out, as a storage system rather than a generation system. This is an answer to the problem that renewables don’t necessarily generate power when you need it, otherwise requiring enough solar or wind capacity to handle peak demand which would be idle off-peak. But if you can store it off-peak and produce it rapidly at peak, then your generating capacity need not be as high, saving lots of investment $ and land use.