Yes. There is a good sized one, man-made, only 20-odd miles from me. It is called Yards Creek, it is in Blairstown, NJ -- where I grew up coindentally. http://www.pseg.com/customer/usgeneration.html bu specifically, http://www.pseg.com/companies/power/pdf/factsheets/yards_creek.pdf "The Yards Creek Generating Station is a 400 MW pumped-storage hydro plant located five miles northeast of the Delaware Water Gap in Warren County, NJ. PSEG began studying pumped storage in 1947 and the technology had advanced by 1956 to make this type of project feasible. Yards Creek was completed in 1965. Yards Creek has two reservoirs separated in elevation by 700 feet. When electricity demand is low and electricity is inexpensive (mainly nights and weekends), water is pumped from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir. When demand and prices for electricity are high, water is allowed to flow from the upper to lower reservoir. On its way, the water turns three, 140 MW generators. The generators are actually reversible pump turbines that act as motors in one direction and generators in the other. [...]" All in all, in accounts for a very small amount of the power needs in NJ; NJ needs about 2600 MWatts of juice, and this supplies 400 during peak only -- remember, it doesn't generate, it stores. More off topic stuff: while searching google for this info, i searched for 'yards creek gpu', and many of the first 10 hits were 'confidential' documents from pjm.com.. Interesting reading. On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Just to keep it off-topic :) The kinetic water-based accumulating stations actually do exist, though they use elevated reservoirs to store the water. The water is pumped up during off-peak hours, and then electricity is generated during peaks. This is not common, though, because most energy sources can be throttled to save fuel, or to accumulate in-flowing water naturally. However, I think we will see more of those accumulating stations augmenting green energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, tidal) which have erratic performance on shorter time scales, unless things like very large supercapacitors or hydrolizers/fuel cells become a lot cheaper.
In some cases accumulating stations are useful in places remote from any regular power sources because they can minimize energy loss in long transmission lines (it is proportional to current squared, while delivered power is linear to the current).
--vadim
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, blitz wrote:
One last addition to this idiotic water idea.. since the water doesn't get up there to the reservoir on the roof by itself, add your costs of huge pumps, plus the cost of pumping it up there, and a less than 100% efficiency in converting falling water to electricity. Also, add heating it in the winter to keep it liquid instead of solid, decontamination chemicals (cant have any Leigonella bacillus growing in there in the summer) Its all moot, as the weight factor makes this a non-starter.
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