793 comments on Some Cautionary Thoughts about Wind
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793 comments on Some Cautionary Thoughts about Wind
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Pumped storage.
As I've mentioned to before, it's a mature, reliable, efficient, simple technology that's already widely deployed to smooth out mismatches in supply and demand of electricity. Storage needs are surprisingly low - a few days - so existing reservoirs could be retrofitted with more generator turbines and lower catchment areas to quickly provide enormous amounts of pumped storage capacity.
Moreover, modest overbuilding of capacity allows a small amount of storage - about 5 days - to reliably provide a region's electricity supply (at least for the case of Ontario, given hourly supply and demand data for 2007). The technical aspects of this aren't a particularly hard problem.
Wind combined with pumped storage is more expensive than nuclear.
Nuclear is already combined with pumped storage and gas power plants.