| Pumped storage
Left: The potential for seawater pumped storage hydropower in coastal depressions of China. Source Yufan Fan et al
announced a US$89.47m credit agreement with the French Development Agency (AFD) to implement the Bac Ai pumped storage hydropower plant in Khanh Hoa province. The Bac Ai is Vietnam’s first pumped-storage plant with a designed capacity of 1200MW, comprising four turbines of 300MW each, with a total investment of US$802.5m. Once completed, it will serve as a strategic facility for energy storage, grid balancing, and national power system management and will contribute to emission reduction in the power sector, aligning with the Vietnamese Government’s commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Australian outlook Australia is also intensifying its focus on pumped storage,
with industry and government stakeholders calling for urgent expansion of long-duration energy storage as the country accelerates its energy transition. A new roadmap released by the International
Hydropower Association (IHA) and its Australian members warns that without rapid deployment of pumped storage, reliability and affordability could be compromised as coal and gas capacity retires and renewable generation increases across the National Electricity Market.
Launched at a bipartisan policy event in Canberra,
the roadmap highlights pumped storage as essential for balancing low-cost variable renewables – particularly solar – and providing multi-day discharge capability that complements shorter-duration battery systems. According to Australia’s draft 2026 Integrated
System Plan, the system may require around 27GW of storage by 2030 and as much as 55GW / 618GWh by 2050 to maintain grid reliability. The roadmap sets out six priority actions for government, including embedding long-duration storage targets into national planning, strengthening market signals that reward firming capacity, adopting risk-sharing investment frameworks, streamlining approvals, funding early- stage development, and coordinating transmission investment.
Industry leaders argue that while a pipeline of pumped storage projects is advancing – with potential to generate thousands of construction and operational jobs – supportive policy frameworks will be required to translate proposals into delivered capacity. The roadmap coincides with project progress
in Tasmania, where tendering has begun for redevelopment of the Tarraleah hydropower scheme, expected to deliver greater output using existing water resources.
Australia’s participation in the global Grid and Energy
Storage Pledge further underscores the expectation that pumped storage will play a central role alongside batteries in meeting national commitments to expand storage and grid infrastructure by 2030.
Seawater considerations As signatories of the previously mentioned letter to
the president of the EU said, China understands that pumped hydro is essential to its own economic future and energy security. With over 90GW of pumped storage project under construction, it now has more than the rest of the world combined. A recent study has also looked at the development of seawater pumped storage hydropower in China. YuFan Fan et al claim that that this type of pumped storage offers a promising solution to the intermittency of offshore wind and photovoltaic power in China’s coastal regions. However, they add, a targeted planning approach is lacking. The authors present a novel multi-stage, data-driven
potential model that looks at the unique advantages of coastal topography to improve reservoir depth estimation and more accurately quantify energy storage potential. Technically feasible locations were identified based on environmental and regulatory constraints, with cost-reduction criteria applied to screen candidate sites. Finally, a multi-objective optimisation framework simultaneously minimised total construction cost, and spatial distribution disparities to select an optimal combination of sites. The results identify approximately 20,000 potential coastal sites with a combined storage capacity of 4379 GWh. Among them, 87 sites exhibit average construction costs approaching those of conventional freshwater pumped storage systems. Considering the low excavation costs of depressions, the actual construction costs may be lower than the estimated values. Under projected 2050 electricity-storage requirements, only 15 well-distributed site combinations with a total installed capacity of 19.2GW can satisfy national demand while remaining cost-competitive with alternative storage technologies. According to the authors, their study provides a
scalable, data-driven framework to support coordinated planning of seawater pumped storage infrastructure alongside renewable energy development.
US potential
In the US, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) is developing tools and partnering with industry to unlock the full potential of the country’s pumped
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