Doesn’t it make sense to use solar to pump sea water into man made reservoirs in hot countries, and in cold/wet countries use wind and natural rain to fill reservoirs?
As a layman it seems infinitely better than nuclear or battery storage.
In: Technology
Essentially, by pumping the water into reservoirs, you are using the water and altitude to store the solar generated energy. When you view it this way, you will realize that you cannot store more energy than you generated with the solar power – and while you are doing the pumping, you are losing energy – heat from friction in the pumps, leaks, etc. The result – you would have more energy if you just used the Solar energy directly, in the electrical grid. Storing that energy by pumping water uphill would only make sense if that was the most efficient “battery” you could conceive.
The other thing to consider is how the water in lakes and rivers got there in the first place. The answer is that the energy of the sun heated the ocean, the water evaporated, then the heat of the sun caused the wind to blow the clouds over land and it rained. So what you are proposing to build already exists, and has a solar energy gathering surface using 70% of the surface area of the earth. You would have to be pretty ingenious to outperform just using the rivers and lakes that already exist.
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