Tracking neighborhood closed-loop pumped hydro storage potential

Abstract

Worldwide, energy is at the center of the socio-economical, geopolitical, and climate crises. For this reason, governments, businesses, and communities are promoting green energy to boost their energy resilience and energy independence sustainably. However, the bottleneck of replacing fossil fuel power plants entirely with intermittent renewable energy remains the high cost of energy storage systems. The study explored the existence of megawatt-hours scale closed-loop pumped hydro storage reservoirs near communities' centers. A MATLAB algorithm has been developed to detect pairs of reservoirs with one, four, and nine hectares each, and a head of one to three hundred meters, corresponding to an energy capacity of 20 to 540 megawatt hours per pair. For the three cities studied, (Banfora / Burkina, Syracuse / New York, Manisa / Turkey) the results revealed the existence of more than 10.000 megawatt-hours storage capacity in each city which meets or exceeds the need of the communities. Therefore, a 100% renewable energy power grid that is resilient, and reliable, can be achieved faster by adopting distributed closed-loop pumped hydro storage which is likely to attract a large number of smaller investors. © 2023 IEEE.