Pumped storage |
Putting pumped storage on the global agenda
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is a leading advocate of climate change. He has become a close ally of the hydro industry and continues to argue for the necessity of pumped storage developments on the journey to net zero and energy security. He believes that decarbonisation without pumped storage hydropower is a fantasy
storm knocked some of them out, as well as triggering a shutdown of several large wind farms. “There were several factors here, as there always
Above: Malcolm Turnbull has become a close ally of the hydropower industry. Pictured here with Debbie Gray, IHA Climate Policy Manager; Malcolm Woolf, President and CEO of the National Hydropower Association; and Eddie Rich, CEO of the International Hydropower Association. Photo by the National Hydropower Association
“BARELY A DAY PASSES without another reminder of the urgency of the energy transition. Whether it is fire and floods in Australia, the latest grim warning from the IPCC or, indeed, Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine,” said Malcom Turnbull, former Prime Minister of Australia and current Board Member of the International Hydropower Association. “There is a lot of lazy, glib talk about how the transition to net zero requires new technologies - innovations yet to spring from the imagination of a new generation of inventors. But don’t believe a word of it,” Turnbull told delegates in his keynote speech at the National Hydropower Association’s (NHA) Waterpower Week 2022 in Washington DC.
Power station at Talbingo Dam in New South Wales, Australia. The 2000MW Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme will link the Talbingo and Tantangra Dams. credit: crbellette /
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He said that although variable renewable energy supported by storage can take us to a zero-emission energy world, right now the single most important priority should be the planning and construction of Long Duration Electricity Storage (LDES) in the form of pumped storage hydropower. However, in most of the world, this is not yet happening at anything like the required pace. And, as Turnbull calls it, “is the ignored crisis within the energy crisis”.
Premonition
Reflecting on his time as Prime Minister of Australia, Turnbull said that “we were faced with a premonition of what can go wrong if we don’t carefully plan the clean energy transition”.
In 2016 South Australia experienced a massive
blackout. More than any other Australian state South Australia had been building industrial scale wind and solar. As coal burning thermal generation was beginning to close, South Australians were relying for their back up on long transmission lines to thermal generation in a neighbouring state. That was until a
14 | July 2022 |
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are, but one really registered with me,” Turnbull said. “We were building more and more variable renewable energy and not even thinking about the storage we would need to back it up.” This kindled an interest into researching the history and operation of pumped storage. Turnbull discovered that “we didn’t have much of it in Australia and hadn’t built any for more than thirty years” and that “we had to get cracking”. So he gave a speech in early 2017 which highlighted the importance of pumped storage in Australia: a large, dry and mostly flat continent which doesn’t have a lot of hydro compared to other parts of the world. Tunrbull followed his speech up with calls to utilities and the result is that Snowy Hydro 2.0 is under construction. This 2000MW scheme links two large dams, Tantangra and Talbingo, about 27km apart and 700m difference in elevation. It should begin generating in 2025 and will be able to run for seven and a half days without repumping; storing 350GWh of electricity.
“Magnificent though Snowy 2.0 will be, it is not sufficient for Australia’s LDES needs,” said Tunbull.
New South Wales Australia needs much more long duration storage.
AEMO is the Australian Energy Market Operator and manages the National Electricity Market (NEM) which covers most of Australia. At 5000km from top to bottom the NEM is the longest connected electricity market in the world. AEMO has forecast that Australia will need at least another 45 GW of long duration storage in its NEM alone. The global figure is close to 900GW. So how do we get it done? Turnbull asked. First of all, each energy market operator has to assess how much long duration storage it needs, and at what durations. In doing so, he says, we need to recognise that in almost all markets without nuclear power, the end of thermal generation means the end of continuous generation. There is also a clear need for a competitive market mechanism that incentivises developers to build storage capacity at the lowest cost to protect the interests of consumers. According to Turnbull, the leading example of such a mechanism can be found in Australia’s largest state, New South Wales. In 2018 Water NSW, which owns and operates many
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