Prospection of Neighborhood Megawatthours Scale Closed Loop Pumped Hydro Storage Potential

Abstract

Energy is at the center of the global socio-economical, geopolitical, and climate crisis. For this reason, countries are looking to boost their energy independence through the integration of distributed green electricity. However, the bottleneck of intermittent renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuel energy remains the high cost of large-scale energy storage. The study explored the existence of megawatt-hours scale closed-loop pumped hydro-storage reservoirs near communities. A MATLAB algorithm has been developed to detect 1, 4, 9 hectares reservoirs with a separation distance less than 1000 meters, and a head over 100 meters, corresponding to an energy capacity of 20 to 400 megawatt-hours per pairs. For the cities studied (Banfora, Syracuse, Manisa), the results revealed the existence of more than 10.000 megawatt-hours storage capacity in each city, which exceed the need of the communities. In the 4 hectares sites category, all cities have over 80 pairs of reservoirs ideal for distributed storage system implementation. Therefore, a 100% renewable energy power grid that is resilient, reliable, can be achieved faster by adopting distributed closed-loop pumped hydro-storage, which has limited environmental impact and is likely to attract a large number of smaller investors.