Water battery: Riverbank Power brings new twist to pumped storage
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
I have a feature in today’s Toronto Star about a local company called Riverbank Power, founded by a former wind developer who’s determined to open up opportunities for large-scale energy storage across North America. Riverbank does pumped hydro storage, but not like conventional projects that require the right geography and topology (i.e. a large natural reservoir hundreds of metres over lake level).
Riverbank depends more on geology. It looks for brownfield sites that are located next to a large body of water and transmission lines (with adequate capacity). It then digs a few deep holes to figure out the rock conditions. If the rock is hard and if the site meets all other conditions, it will excavate massive caverns 600 metres below the surface that can safely contain 3.8 billion litres of water.
Sounds crazy ambitious, eh? (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca