Energy storage in the Alberta context
Quote:
TC Energy is building a facility like this near Hinton, Alta., named the Canyon Creek Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Project, which is set to add 75 MW of "on-demand, flexible, clean energy" to the province's grid.
Other countries have built much larger facilities, such as Switzerland's Nant de Drance, which is capable of putting out 900 MW of electricity at any given moment and storing 20,000 MW-hours of energy in total — the equivalent of roughly 400,000 electric-car batteries.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...939655?cmp=rss
This is good info, as it shows, given our demand of ~10GW a day, that we could power ~1/11 of the grid for 20 days with the size of storage the Swiss have. Site C is about 1100MW, so that should put it into context that Alberta has no prospect for that level of pumped hydro. You also have to have "good days" to recharge the reservoir. It seems it can be a part of the solution in Alberta, but a small part.
The other interesting bit is ~400k car batteries of storage. There is talk of using EV's as grid storage, but I just don't see that vast number,(which could only use a fraction of the vehicle storage given it's needs of use as a vehicle) and that the pool of vehicles available at any given time will be lower than that you start to see they may be useful for providing small bits of power for grid stability in tight situations, but I don't really get the math on how they could be something of use or reliance in non-extreme cases.
Anyway, always nice to see some real numbers for these things.