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Why California Is Reconsidering Its Decision to Shun Nuclear Power
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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That's another kind of storage, much more long-term. Even before battery prices dropped to rediculous levels, pumped hydro often had a battery system, too, because it was often more economical.
Pumped hydro is rapid power restoration. It takes no time to spin up and can deliver vast quantities of power. The original idea was that you used you baseline grid power to load it and then if your coal turbines blew up you started dropping the stored water to deliver emergency power. The more modern concept is that you use renewables to pump the water uphill while they are available and drop the water when they are not. It's a more functional version of the concrete block tower storage that was banged on about a few years ago. It's also proven tech, there are functional implementations of pumped hydro all over the place and they have been in place for decades.
Sadly it requires the right geography (it would become ridiculously expensive when you actually need to build the height difference instead). On the global scale that's not a problem, but locally the distribution of beneficial features is varying widely, so the potential to upscale pumped hydro is often limited (see for example countries like Switzerland that could build 50 times their required storage easily compared to the Netherlands with their highest mountain just 300 meters over sea-level).
PS: There are well-scalable concepts for flat coastal areas (for example under sea reservoirs where water is pumped out of submerged tanks, creating power when left to fill up again), but for now mostly as proof-of-concept only.
That is true, I would have thought California would be ripe for it given its mountains.