Remember that peak power is much more valuable than non-peak power (in some places non-peak renewable power has a negative value) so buying it at a discount, wasting most of it in the process, and selling it at peak time can still be economical.
If the numbers in the parent post are true, then you'd probably still be better off just pumping the water high up with that energy and letting it fall down when the energy is needed. On the other hand nabla9 quoted numbers that look very good.
yeah, or the concrete block thing - but water requires valleys you're allowed to flood.
BTW one solution is to use existing hydro dams as partners to wind/solar, add extra generation capacity to the dams, share the transmission infrastructure between the wind/solar/hydro and simply let the dams fill when the wind blows/sun shines. That's more efficient than pumped storage
The province of Québec stops or reduces the flow of many of its hydroelectric dams at night due to the much market lower prices spot prices for electricity, especially since nuke plants flood the markets with unused capacity.
That's great - but really the dams need to be able to help handle peak grid capacity, and to do that they need to be able to generate more than they were originally designed for so that they can trade off against those other sources that weren't around when the dams were built
There's a spare generator at the Manic 5 dam for super-high demand events like Christmas, Easter, and also cold fronts, and maybe a spare gas plant somewhere. Otherwise the purpose of holding back water at night is to prevent reservoir depletion in low-precipitation years, rather than building extra capacity for high-demand peaks.
