 I'm Guillermo Salvatier and this is Perspectives on Energy. Thank you all for joining. Once again, today we'll be talking about pumped storage plants. This is a resource that a lot of us have forgotten about, but it is a very valuable asset, a component of the diversified energy portfolio in most places. So once again, I am Guillermo Salvatier, I'm Director of International Services for HSI, the Health and Safety Institute. And today I wanted to discuss some often overlooked resource. We're all familiar with hydroelectric power and hydropower, but one of the things that we tend to forget about recently has been the availability of pumped storage hydropower. And so what is this, right? We go to the next slide, we'll have a diagram of what that looks like. So if we zoom into this slide here, for example, there's two different kinds, there's a closed loop, pumped storage hydropower, and there's the open loop, right? And the whole point of this is that most of you are familiar with hydropower, conventional hydropower, the one on the left, whereas water flows from a reservoir down to a river, then that pressure spends a turbine, right? And then that motor, of course, that spends a generator and then you have your self electricity as a product eventually. But there's no way to really recover that, you're just waiting for that reservoir to continually be filled by rain or snow or snow melt and that sort of thing. And there's no way to really pump that up, right? Unless you have a way to actually collect that in an upper reservoir. So you're seeing in the slide on the left, right? You have like an upper reservoir. And the option there, for example, is to make it behave like a load. Well, another way to treat this would be imagine it as a very, very old energy storage system. Almost like, think of it as a battery, right? Like we were using it nowadays. Interesting thing here, if you look at a closed loop pump storage hydropower, the one on the right, right? It's almost the same thing, but you have two different containers, right? One, of course, is in a higher elevation as the upper reservoir. And you have one of the lower elevations called the lower reservoir. And you have a whole pipe, which is a penstock tunnel and it goes into the powerhouse. Eventually it goes, it spins a turbine or a pump and then of course that spins a generator. But that generator is also a motor depending on how it's configured, right? So one of the benefits this has is that it can be used to generate power when you have your peak of the day and the upper reservoir is full. Then it'll run pretty much like a conventional hydroelectric plant where you're running the water out of the upper reservoir into the lower reservoir. But then at certain times of the day when you have an excess of power, you usually the valley of the day or you have, for example, nowadays, it could be the middle of the day where it's due to all the solar or the wind. Well, you can use that, turn that into a motor and it becomes of course a pump, pumping water back up to the upper reservoir where it's storing all the resource. So how is this beneficial, right? And comparing that to the one in the left as well where something is always running, right? Or it could be a run of river, for example, or you can also have the upper reservoir filling a reservoir that could be used in another closed-loop system as well, right? So there's different ways of doing this. That's like a third system we're discussing here. But the point is that they can use that upper reservoir to augment the output of the open open reservoir open loop pump storage hydropower, right? So there's different ways to do this. So the next interesting fact about this is that, you know, there is quite a bit of these resources throughout the country. If you go to the next slide, we'll see how this has been around for a long time. So right now, for example, this is the largest contributor to US energy storage, right? It is a commercial storage capacity in the United States. And what you can see is that capacity has increased 1.4 gigawatts or 1,400 megawatts over the last decade with the 90% increase due to upgrades, right, in the existing fleet. So right now in the US, we have about 43 pump storage hydropower plants and usually the capacity is 533 gigawatt hours. So there is quite a bit of energy throughout the country. Now mind you, this is for capacity of 2022 and it's accounted for 96% of these utility scale energy storage capacity facilities. So why is this important? And I'm noticing that a lot of us have forgotten in some case, for example, this was a very valuable clean energy resource. In some places, it's no longer being treated that way. For example, hydroelectric power is no longer considered a clean resource in some areas because of the fact that it displaces, for example, land or it changes the floor of a river or even changes the biology of certain areas. And there's a lot of truth in that in the sense that it is disrupting, for example, many environmental issues, right? Whether it's the floor of a river, it's the spawning grounds of a lot of fish or even entire cultures, for example, I have grown around these entire rivers where you're the force of this place and a large part of the population somewhere else. So that's one of the issues that there's kind of become controversial and a lot of them are being retired. So another solution, of course, is, and you see this a lot in the East Coast of the US and more of the mountainous regions, one of them, for example, is something that is important is the areas of where you have dominion power, for example, is it has a pretty sizable pump storage facility. And one of the resources that they're actually thinking of using, of course, will be these flows for the commissioned coal mines, whether they're the open pit mines or the actual closed mines themselves that can be used to either store, for example, water, or in some cases, actually using the store compressed there. These are all very valuable resources in this case to be able to use that as another form of energy storage. We do have quite a bit of like decommissioned or abandoned coal mines in these areas that can be utilized for that fashion and there will be a closed loop system. That's another example of what can be done in this regard. But the other important thing here is that, for the most part, right, this is something that has been around the late 19th century in Europe and it has been, I think one of the first ones that came online in the US was in the 1920s. So this thing has been in service for, this technology has been in use in this country for almost over 100 years. Definitely something that's tried and tested, not as efficient as an overall hydroelectric power plant and but definitely is something that is making a comeback. In fact, recently I went to a USCA's new technology forum and one of the items discussed was making these resources once again available. So what is the perspective of application of these resources, right? We can go to the next slide, I think it's the third one we can see where we're at, we're looking at, right? So right now there are definitely some projects in development, right? We're looking at an increase of 40% of these facilities, right? So right now there are quite a bit of these plans in development in 2022 and 67 and 2019. So we have increased the number of plants that are in development. Most of these are however are in upgrades to existing facilities, but and so they're not building any new ones, they're just updating the ones that are already there because in the US, you know, one of these only regions in the world with no projects under construction, right? So right now we're just kind of like using what's already there. The other interesting thing is two more states have adopted storage mandates, right? So some of the things that they're looking at is if they're already existing and they're not gonna decommission them, what they might, what they would like you to do is go ahead and retrofit them and getting back into a, get it back online and commercial once again with modern improvements and making them more reliable, cleaner and also a lot more effective. So one of the things to actually look at as well as here is the fact that as we have more and more of these energy storage mandates, one of the interesting things that we can look at is that this is another very valuable resource that really can respond very quickly to already existing and it's rather inexpensive compared to all the other resources that are out there. And a lot of the infrastructure is already in place meaning the substations, transmission lines, easements, permitting even, so it's already there just a matter of upgrading and updating what they have. Another thing that's concerning is that in a lot of places in the East, right? There's a lot of data centers popping up everywhere and these data centers require a lot of megawatts. I'm talking about 20, 30, 50, 100 megawatts in some cases, right? And that is quite a bit of load. So that's another reason why a lot of these sites are usually they'll source in the areas that have for example nearby available generation. In a lot of cases it requires a lot of new substations built around that area. So what they're looking at in this case, right? Is trying to site them near places where you have existing hydro or old hydro that can be retrofitted and recommissioned or even these pump storage facilities that can be used to actually supply power in a more localized fashion in conjunction with renewable resources. And in fact, this is a resource that goes hand in hand very well with the variability of solar and wind. And one of the important aspects of this is that that same generator, what is generating power on one cycle, it can go ahead and turn just by opening a breaker, closing another breaker, it now becomes a pump and it's then acting as load as it pumps water back up to the reservoir. And this is very beneficial during times of excess megawatts that are out there in the system. So rather than curtailing the output of solar and wind, you can just harness this and use this to pump water up. And there's a whole lot of different facilities, right? So right now there's a couple of other projects, for example, in the Middle East, then the New Neon Project, for example, they are applying a lot of like desalination facilities, right? To behave as load during these periods of excess solar and wind generation. So the way they're gonna manage that, of course, is some storage, right? But then they're gonna use most of that excess as the load, and then that will be used, of course, during the desalination. So desal is a very energy-intensive process. So as you can imagine, there's a demand for the product of desal plants produced, which is fresh water, how to see water, but then at the same time, they also behave as a dampening effect when it comes to these renewable resources and all the variability. So that becomes very useful and helpful in this regard. So another interesting thing that we noticed in this USCA Advanced Energy Innovation Forum was that they were identifying the different costs, right, when it came to these new construction. And there's something that was brought up by Bank of America. And Bank of America actually said that even when you're considering all the entire overall costs or everything else, that nuclear, of course, was the least expensive, followed by coal, but then you had all the projects in there that was hydroelectric, was the next one, and then there was natural gas, and then there was wind and solar. And sorry, it was solar and then wind. Wind actually is now becoming, it's not one of the more expensive ones, mostly because a lot of the subsidies are gone from the production tax products. So there's definitely an incentive to do this financially. And definitely if the facilities are already existing, they have to break ground in any place new or they can use, for example, existing geography, for example, like these abandoned coal mines or those strip mines that can then be turned into like ponds or lakes or reservoirs, then you're making the best use of something else that would have been otherwise wasted. So how can this help us in this regard? Because there are quite a number of places where we can go ahead and apply this. And usually, of course, there's areas of varying elevation, which we have mountainous regions, but even areas where we have rolling terrain also works. And a lot of this information that I got on these slides came straight out of the Department of Energy. So definitely as open, it's public domain information, but they will show you where most of these sites are at. And naturally, as you can expect, right, you're gonna see those all on the Appalachian Mountains or the Blue Ridge, you're also gonna see them in the Rockies and all those portions over there in that part of the country where you have some snowmelt, some elevation, and the opportunities to actually have that kind of construction with one reservoir above and another one below. And you see other examples of these everywhere else, right? For example, in the Canary Islands, you have examples of this where you have a pre-willed developed system already for cum storage. Now, in places like Hawaii, I can definitely see how this could be a benefit, especially when you have areas of considerable elevation and you have areas where there's a need to, for example, have some water storage as well, right? And there's always opportunities for using some of that excess power for the desalination, but definitely this opportunity is there and this could be another resource that could be used in the islands. Of course, I have a strong feeling that distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar batteries or EVs and that kind of storage will become a really, really important aspect, right? To use in the island, especially when everybody has a roof and it's a good opportunity to actually place panels on everybody's roofs, whether it's the, if somebody has financed by the utilities, a third party, or even the homeowners themselves, that's something that could be leveraged as a reliable resource for the utilities. Now, that won't work without proper storage. So it could be batteries, it could be something else or it could be load to kind of damp temper that a little bit, such as a desal or of course, pump storage would be something that would be really, really beneficial. Now, mind you, it doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be, for example, fresh water. You can have pump storage using seawater, right? Where there's plenty of seawater around the Hawaiian islands and you don't need that much head, which is the elevation, where you have, for example, the upper reservoir and then the Penn Stock and the lower reservoir or the actual turbine to turn that. It can be a couple of hundred feet of elevation, which is easily achieved by just like what the ad is referred to as ocean side versus like a mountain side, reservoir in the mountain area can actually fulfill that particular need. So again, but I'm sure there's a lot of permitting issues with regarding that. So something that I'm not too familiar with the islands, especially the Hawaiian islands when it comes to this, but at least in the mainland I can tell you that there's a lot of availability of terrain and areas that have been already like decommissioned and abandoned that could be repurposed for this particular aspect. So hopefully I would like to see, for example, any questions on this or any other opportunities to discuss it. One thing I think that we can probably learn from is the fact that this is a technology has been around for over a hundred years, has been used globally. There are a lot of other projects right now taking place around the globe and they are definitely looking at expanding and maybe even retrofitting some of these other older facilities while at the same time bringing some new ones online. So definitely it's something that we really should have fought behind on when it comes to training and development. But when it comes to our operators, but also as a particular resource that we use in our energy portfolio, right? There has been conversation where, they wanna talk about solar and hydrogen gas or fuel cells for that and that's great. And I really hope that that becomes commercial sooner than later, but the thing is right now there's not a lot of facilities out there that have that commercial availability of some of these like hydrogen generating or the electrolyzers or hydrogen generators. I know that next era energy has its first one that they've already going commercial and then next month, December 2023. And I'm really, really eager to see how they perform and how they do that. Some of that will be gasified for combustion and I don't wanna be used for fuel cells, which that's really a really, really strong interest in that, not just myself, but the whole industry's looking forward to that. Not a very big unit and not a very large facility, but it's definitely an opportunity to see how we perform in this regard. So, and then places like in Hawaii, I know definitely there's quite the academic university out there that is looking at a proof of concept project that they're already working on. So definitely something that's exciting in one of the universities in Hawaii. So again, looking forward to what more we learn, what else we can learn about this and hopefully see it applied in many parts of the world, not just domestically or in the mainland, but also in places like Hawaii or in other islands. I think there's a lot of opportunities there that we can definitely employ this thing. So anyway, so if anybody has questions, some more questions about post storage, we can definitely discuss this. We have at HSI, we have a simulator partnership with Western Services Corporation, which is one of our partners. We have a simulation that also shows, kind of shows you the basics of operating a hydroelectric plant. There's also one in the talks about post storage and then runs for a few lessons on how to do that. So definitely, if anybody's interested in learning how to operate one of these devices or one of these facilities, we can make that happen with our particular online trainings platform. So it's always fun to learn, always fun to explore. And we have a few projects coming up where we're going to work with several islands of the Caribbean regarding this. Now there, I don't see a lot of post storage facilities, but they do have a lot of renewable resources that they're working with. And they are definitely interested in storage options. So this is something that may be considering at some point when it comes to using a freshwater reservoir that basically moves water from a higher reservoir to a lower reservoir as needed throughout the day, especially when they're dealing with these like variable resources, whether it's solar or wind. And in some cases, they're buying power from another larger islands through an undersea cable. So in that case, it's kind of hard to curtail that. All right, so this is, I believe all I have for you today is a shorter presentation, but definitely something that is, I wanted to see if I get some conversation going on this forgotten resource. And the important thing here is that, we have this old existing infrastructure for all of these sites that it may not be available everywhere, but they're out there. And it's quite a good number of them in the U.S. in operation to this day. And there's some of them that have been decommissioned, but they can be brought back online with some upgrading and updating. And they can definitely be an important resource when it comes to one. Serving as part of the portfolio when it comes to renewable resources, especially something that makes zero carbon emissions and always reliable, always on. They are ready to run almost immediately and they can be even used as a Black Star resource when it comes to reliability, which is the other important aspect, right? These sites are fully dispatchable, which can be told, but the same can't be said about some of these batteries or some of these renewable resources, where they're often curtailed or their output is flat and limited out. So definitely opportunities here to actually apply them. They can improve reliability. They can improve the cost. Again, not as efficient as other resources, other hydroelectric resources, but definitely they make up for it in reliability and availability and also flexibility, which is one of the more important things considering one of these devices. Again, so thank you all again for listening in and watching and by the way, I encourage you to leave some comments. I'll try and answer them as soon as I can and I invite you to follow up again on this next series of videos where we would discuss additional renewable resources and mainly energy storage devices. So thank you again and have yourself a lovely evening and I think we have a holiday next week. So definitely enjoy the holidays for most of you. Thank you.