Lowering Civil Engineering Costs for Pumped Hydro Storage

Energy storage is highly topical in the industry at present and solutions which can reduce the cost while increasing the reliability and longevity of the storage system are desperately needed in order to facilitate the roll out of renewable energy technologies.

Pumped hydro storage has been used for a number of years and at various scales to balance a mismatch between the supply and demand of electricity. The wider deployment of pumped storage is limited though as the civil engineering costs can be prohibitive or if the local topography has insufficient vertical separation
between reservoirs, the storage capacity can be too low to make the scheme viable. This project proposes to develop a concept which would significantly reduce the cost of pumped hydro systems and could greatly increase the number of sites where the technolgy could be deployed.