A recent test shows that Quidnet’s technology can store energy in pressurized water underground for months at a time.
I wonder if this suffers from the same power density issue as most alternatives to pumped hydro systems. It’s REALLY hard to do better than megatons of water pumped 500 meters up a hill.
yeah, the scalability of this seems like a pretty big challenge
annoyingly, they talk about the amount of water they pumped only in terms of energy (35MWh) and not in terms of water volume.
I think they do that because, if you estimate the water volume…it’s pretty unimpressive.
going off the numbers for Bath County Pumped Storage Station, the largest in the US, and until 2021 the largest in the world:
total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh - meaning that this power station built in the late 70s / early 80s has almost 700 times the storage capacity of this 35MWh demo
between their upper reservoir and lower reservoir, their water capacity is 78.4 million cubic meters. so as a crude estimate, Quidnet’s demo project used ~115,000 cubic meters.
Olympic swimming pool contains 2.500 cubic meters. so, again with the caveat that this is a rough estimate because Quidnet didn’t publish the actual numbers…this demo they’re bragging about involved 45 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.
