Tag: pump

Gas Prices: How Your Driving Behavior Impacts Costs at The Pump

American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers weighs in, arguing that a long-term energy strategy is needed. Record high gas prices have created stress for motorists across the nation, and many experts expect prices to remain elevated in the near future as demand for summer travel heats up.

On Thursday, the national average retail price for regular gasoline surged to another record high, hitting $4.41 per gallon.

While you may not be able to control the prices at the pump, you can control how you drive. Certain driving behaviors can actually help consumers save significantly when it comes to filling up at the pump, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, told FOX Business.

It’s the “easiest” thing to do when trying to combat those rising fuel costs, he said. Keep your tachometer as low as possible. De Haan says drivers should keep feet light on the gas when accelerating. The heavier you are on the accelerator, the more fuel your engine is using, he said.

The tachometer should be used as a gauge for drivers to see how much fuel they’re actually using, according to De Haan.  The tachometer measures the working speed of an engine in RPMs, or rotations per minute. It is located next to the speedometer on a vehicle’s instrument panel.

“The higher the needle goes, the more gas your engine is guzzling,” De Haan said.  The objective is to keep your tachometer as low as possible and not to “bash on the pedal,” De Haan added.

Cars crowding the turn lane into Murphy Express at Beal Parkway and Racetrack Road as gas lines started popping up at numerous gas stations around the Fort Walton Beach area in Florida. (USA Today Network via Reuters Connect / Reuters Photos)

It’s also important to keep the speed of the car under control because speeding increases fuel consumption. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, gas mileage will decrease “rapidly at speeds above 50 MPH.”

The best way to control speed is using cruise control. Although cruise control may not be useful in some congested parts of the country, like New York or Chicago. However, the feature can be “more effective and efficient than a human trying to maintain the same pressure on the gas pedal,” according to De Haan.

Maintenance: Make sure your check engine light is not on If you have a check engine light on, especially if it’s flashing, it should be checked as soon as possible. A lot of sensors on cars are critically important, but the check engine light is the “most critical,” according to De Haan. When the light is flashing, “it’s basically telling you that it’s in distress,” De Haan said.

The car essentially goes into “limp mode,” which means “the car has lost some critical sensor or something is critically wrong and … is basically using up to twice as much fuel to protect itself from catastrophic damage,” De Haan added. Another thing motorists should be checking is tire pressure.

A man checks gas prices at a gas station in Buffalo Grove, Ill., March 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh / AP Newsroom). When a tire loses air pressure, there is more friction between the tire and the road. That increase in friction will lower a car’s fuel efficiency, according to De Haan.

Removing access weight

Leaving heavy objects in the back seat or truck of a car can also hurt fuel efficiency. In fact, every hundred pounds will reduce fuel efficiency by one to two miles per gallon, according to De Haan.

Racks that sit on the roof of cars, typically in the summer or winter months, are also working against drivers. Those racks will “absolutely destroy the aerodynamics of your vehicle” and drive down fuel efficiency by 25 to 35%, De Haan said.

“They’re just like a mattress on your roof,” he said. “Your car is working harder to offset that object on the top of your car.”

Keep an eye on your AC this summer

When the air conditioning is running in your car, “you’re generally putting more of a load on your engine. You’ll burn a lot less fuel if you crack a window instead, according to GasBuddy. 

MYTH: It takes more gas to restart your car

That may have been true 30 years ago, “but that’s why vehicles have adopted that start stop technology,” according to De Haan. In fact, if you’re going to be sitting in traffic more than 10 seconds, it makes more sense to shut the vehicle off.

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Source: Gas prices: How your driving behavior impacts costs at the pump | Fox Business

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The Great Millennial Blood Pressure Problem

You know the guy. You work with him, or you’re friends with him, or maybe you even are him. He’s youngish. Fit-ish. Flirting with fasting and CBD. Always tracking his steps, his sleep, his heart rate, his meditation streaks. But these trackers overlook one metric: blood pressure. Those two numbers measure how well your blood vessels handle the 2,000 gallons of blood your heart pumps around your body in a day. And young guys’ vessels aren’t doing the job so well.

In 2019, Blue Cross Blue Shield released data from the claims of 55 million people in its Health of Millennials report. One of the most shocking stats: From 2014 to 2017, the prevalence of high blood pressure in people ages 21 to 36 jumped 16 percent, and compared with Gen Xers when they were the same age, high blood pressure among millennials was 10 percent more prevalent.

So what exactly do we mean by “high”? We mean blood pressure that measures above 130 systolic (the pressure in your arteries when your heart contracts) or 80 diastolic (the pressure between beats). And when that happens, explains preventive cardiologist Michael Miedema, M.D., M.P.H., of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, your blood vessels stiffen up, forcing blood pressure even higher. That can create stress on vessel walls, leading to an ugly chain of inflammation, plaque buildup, and higher risk for heart attack and stroke.

For the longest time, most young people didn’t have to worry about this. “Youth has always been a relative Teflon coating,” says Eric Topol, M.D., founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. Blood-pressure issues were strictly for older people, and the idea that this protection might be eroding is forcing doctors to examine what’s really going on. Here’s what they’re finding.

All That #Wellness Isn’t Making you Healthy

You’d think customized vitamins, kombucha, and cryotherapy would get you to #peakwellness, but when it comes to blood pressure, they’re not doing much. “With millennials, you hear a lot about wellness and not as much about health—and they’re different,” says Christopher Kelly, M.D., a cardiologist at North Carolina Heart and Vascular Hospital, and a millennial himself.

“Wellness trends promise great results with little effort, but few have any proven long-term benefits,” he says. “You won’t see ads on Instagram for the few things that we know promote health, including regular exercise, not smoking, being at a healthy weight, and screening for blood-pressure and cholesterol issues.”

Being Broke Can Break You

Millennials carry more than $1 trillion in debt. A large chunk of that is due to student loans—millennials owe more than four times what Gen Xers do. Add this weight to other pressures and it makes sense that millennials reported the highest average stress level of any generation, at 5.7 out of 10, in the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey. (Gen Xers came in at 5.1, Gen Zers at 5.3, and boomers at a relatively zen 4.1.)

“Most of us overlook that the medical word we use for high blood pressure, hypertension, is really hyper and tension,” says cardiologist Andrew M. Freeman, M.D., of National Jewish Health in Denver. Not only does chronic stress play a role in high blood pressure, but the responses we often have to what’s stressing us out—like binge eating and cutting sleep short—jack it up, too.

Blame Seamless and Postmates

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that people who ate home-cooked meals almost every day consumed nearly 1,000 fewer calories a week than those who went with home-cooked once a week or less. And that’s bad news for millennials: The average millennial eats out or buys takeout food five times per week, according to a Bankrate survey, which means they’re devouring all the pressure-boosting sodium and calories that come with it.

(Sodium is particularly sneaky: In one study, 90 percent of people thought their restaurant meal had about 1,000 milligrams—around half a day’s worth—less than it did.) And sodium ends up in your diet via some surprising foods, like bread (see the top sources here).

Then there’s the weight factor. Millennials are on track to be the heaviest generation in history, and extra weight on a young adult can ratchet up blood pressure and thicken the heart muscle early, inviting heart disease later on.

It’s Easy to Avoid Moving

“The heart requires the challenge of moving blood through the body to keep things supple and functioning normally,” says Aaron Baggish, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital. And between more screen time, longer commutes, and more labor-saving devices, Dr. Baggish explains, “many millennials are just not doing enough activity.” See the best exercises to get started with.But There’s Good News About Young Guys’ Blood Pressure

You can head off this whole saga with some pretty simple lifestyle changes. Start with the six basic steps at right, and keep on top of your blood-pressure rates with the three gizmos below. Even minor adjustments can bring down your BP, especially the ones below.

6 Small Changes That Take Blood Pressure Down

1.) Lose two pounds. For every two pounds or so you shed, you could see a one-point drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number).

2.) Get up every 45 minutes and walk around. This simple move was enough to significantly lower diastolic blood pressure in one study.

3.) Eat for your heart. “Following a heart-healthy diet can drop systolic blood pressure as much as a pill can,” says cardiologist Michael Miedema, M.D., M.P.H. That’s about three to five points.

4.) Fill up on potassium. This mineral can counteract the effects of sodium in your diet. Help it out and counter sodium yourself by nixing key sources like bread, cold cuts, and pizza.

5.) Say yes to pickup basketball. The adrenaline and cortisol that swirl around when you’re stressed can hike up blood pressure. In fact, one recent study found that male med students were 13 times as likely to have elevated numbers as their female counterparts. Friends help buffer stress. Bonus if you combine hanging out with a workout.

6.) Monitor pressure at home. Everyone should check their BP once a month at home, even if they’re healthy, says John Elefteriades, M.D., director of the Aortic Institute at Yale-New Haven Hospital. It can help you ID triggers so you can keep them from messing with your numbers and your life.

By: Cassie Shortsleeve

Cassie Shortsleeve is a skilled freelance writer and editor with almost a decade of experience reporting on all things health, fitness, and travel. A former Shape and Men’s Health editor, her work has also been published in Women’s Health, SELF, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, CNTraveler.com, and other national print and digital publications. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her drinking coffee or running around her hometown of Boston.

Source: The Great Millennial Blood Pressure Problem

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How an Ancient Design Technique Could Help Us Survive Extreme Heat

In late June, when temperatures climbed to 115 degrees in Portland, Oregon, homes and buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest had been caught method off guard. Most had been designed for a lot cooler temperatures, with insulation and air flow tuned to deal with reasonable highs and lows. Usually, even on sizzling days, the night lows can be chilly sufficient to deliver down the general temperature of buildings, protecting them from turning into roasting ovens. Air con was sometimes irrelevant, and buildings could often keep snug passively, or with out a lot intervention.

However that was earlier than. The warmth wave confirmed that temperatures can and possibly will proceed to be increased than in earlier a long time. The low- or no-effort temperature management that has been designed into the area’s houses seemingly gained’t have the ability to sustain, based on Mike Fowler, an architect at Seattle-based Mithun. “We’re going to part out of that by the tip of the last decade. And this has been eye-opening for lots of oldsters,” he says.

A brand new sort of constructing design might be wanted within the Pacific Northwest before most individuals anticipated, he says, however design approaches which are usually utilized in hotter, extra extreme climates provide some clues for a way structure might want to evolve.

Architects all over the world are designing options to rising temperatures and extra frequent warmth waves. New supplies, superior warmth modeling strategies, and a few longstanding design ideas are exhibiting that even when temperatures hit sudden peaks, our houses and buildings will have the ability to keep cool with out consuming enormous quantities of vitality.

One formal strategy is a constructing customary often known as Passive House. Initially developed in Germany within the Nineties and now modified for nations and climates all over the world, Passive Home is a performance-based customary that depends on creating tight and energy-efficient constructing “envelopes”—the partitions, roof, and home windows which have the next than regular stage of insulation and seal.

With triple-paned home windows, energy-efficient warmth pumps, and extremely insulated wall methods, Passive Home buildings are virtually air tight and scale back the quantity of temperature change inside when it’s extremely popular or very chilly, resulting in long-term financial savings on vitality prices. The concept of passive constructing goes back centuries throughout continents, and it’s an idea that’s taking up new relevance in locations just like the Pacific Northwest.

Fowler is a member and former president of Passive House Northwest, a regional group working to get extra architects and builders to use these ideas. “The pitch is that you simply’ve obtained one likelihood to put money into your constructing envelope—the home windows, roof, and partitions,” Fowler says. “Do it proper in order that one thing you construct now could be going to be resilient into the long run.”

He says the variety of Passive Home tasks within the area is rising. Mithun, the place Fowler is a senior affiliate, has 4 tasks within the works which are being designed to satisfy the U.S. Passive House standard. “There’s much more curiosity, there’s much more data,” he says. “Would like to see it go sooner, however it’s definitely trending upward.”

Even with out assembly the official customary, most of the concepts behind Passive Home are exhibiting up in locations the place extreme warmth is a matter of each day life. In Phoenix, the structure agency Studio Ma has specialised in designing parts into their buildings that passively maintain them cool, utilizing shading, overhangs, and cantilevers to protect them from the warmth of the desert.

Utilizing thermal-imaging software program, the agency has analyzed surfaces in Phoenix and located that present buildings with heavier supplies like stone and masonry on their exterior surfaces maintain way more warmth than buildings with lighter exteriors, akin to wooden. Through the use of lighter, higher insulated supplies on the skin of buildings and limiting the warmth that falls on them, buildings can have way more manageable inside temperatures, based on Christopher Alt, the agency’s co-founder.

“Some individuals name it ‘outsulation’ as a result of the insulation is on the skin, however it’s very depending on the local weather you’re in,” says Alt. “As individuals in Oregon are experiencing 115 levels, their options most likely look completely different than ours, however the identical form of pondering applies.”

They put these concepts into apply in a brand new 16-floor residence hall in Phoenix for Arizona State College. The agency used daylight and vitality evaluation instruments to optimize the orientation of the home windows, and added small aspects to the facade to permit a part of it to shade itself. This permits sufficient daylight to return in for the constructing to cut back its lighting wants whereas additionally minimizing how a lot the solar heats up the constructing.

Christiana Moss, the agency’s co-founder and managing accomplice, says that particularly for big buildings, architects might want to pay extra consideration to the warmth getting into buildings by means of their home windows. “At this level, it’s nearly obviously irresponsible to not contemplate your glazing ratios and scale back the glass in your facades,” she says.

These sorts of passive cooling ideas may also be inexpensive. Marlene Imirzian runs an architecture firm with places of work in Phoenix and Escondido, California, and she or he’s used passive cooling parts in lots of her tasks, together with methods that mix shading, low-lying operable home windows that pull cool air into buildings, and a photo voltaic chimney that vents sizzling air out on the prime.

Imirzian says these design parts can slash vitality use to a couple of quarter of what present houses use. “It’s not about extremely specialised methods. It’s about utilizing pure flows, defending the glazing from direct photo voltaic achieve and designing the [enclosed space] to permit for air motion,” she says.

Imirzian’s agency utilized this concept in its successful entry within the Metropolis of Phoenix’s internet zero vitality dwelling design competitors. They discovered that implementing these ideas right into a 2,100-square-foot dwelling would find yourself costing about the identical to construct as a typical air conditioned dwelling, with out the necessity to use the air conditioner almost as typically. “Value per sq. foot turns into a non issue. It’s actually about designing with this efficiency in thoughts from the start,” Imirzian says. “If we begin doing these single household houses effectively, we are able to considerably scale back vitality use.”

However there are nonetheless some hurdles to implementing these sorts of passive design strategies. Ben Caine is an architect in Perth, Australia, who designs houses to satisfy the Passive Home customary, and he says that a few of the lighter exterior and insulation supplies generally used on Passive Home tasks are nonetheless exhausting to get in Australia. For issues like wooden fiber and hemp insulation, he says, getting supplies despatched over from Europe can take 4 to 5 months, and be 4 to 5 instances as costly as typical supplies. “The availability chains and distribution channels for lots of those supplies simply don’t exist but,” he says.

He’s nonetheless been in a position to implement some passive cooling strategies in tasks, together with a home he’s now having constructed for himself. By specializing in protecting the constructing envelope tight, including excessive ceilings in some areas of the house and utilizing environment friendly ceiling followers, he says he’s been in a position to scale back warmth from entering into the house and likewise lower down on the necessity for air-con, although not fully.

Although air-con is condemned for losing vitality, Caine says that it’s not essentially evil; cooling a home down truly takes less energy than heating it up. That doesn’t imply he’s turning the A/C on full blast, although. By specializing in air-tightness and passive cooling strategies, even houses in sizzling environments like Australia can lower down on the period of time they want air-con to remain snug.

“What we’re seeking to do is enhance what’s referred to as part shift, that’s the time it takes for the extreme warmth on the skin to move by means of the constructing envelope and attain the within,” Caine says. “Even should you do have air-con put in as a backup, you’re utilizing it rather a lot much less by means of the usage of these supplies.”

With extra locations starting to see increased temperatures, these design ideas might quickly develop into extra of a mainstream a part of structure. Imirzian, who’s presently in talks with builders to develop her internet zero dwelling design for Phoenix, says that it’s solely a matter of time earlier than these sorts of design concepts unfold out past extremely popular climates. “I feel it’s very, very transferable all over the world,” she says.

By: Nate Berg

Source: How an ancient design technique could help us survive extreme heat, no

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Critics:

The history of construction embraces many other fields like structural engineering, Civil engineering, cities growing and Population growth that are relatives to branches of Technology science, history, and architecture to investigate the buildings conservation and recorded their accomplishments. Those fields permit use to analyze modern or Latest construction and prehistoric constructions, as their structures, building Materials, and tools used.

History of building is evolving by different trends in time, marked by few key principles : durability of the materials used, the increasing of height and span, the degree of control exercised over the interior environment and finally the energy available to the construction process.

With the Second Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century, elevators and cranes made high rise buildings and skyscrapers possible, while heavy equipment and power tools decreased the workforce needed. Other new technologies were prefabrication and computer-aided design.

Trade unions were formed to protect construction workers’ interests and occupational safety and health. Personal protective equipment such as hard hats and earmuffs also came into use, and have become mandatory at most sites.

From the 20th century, governmental construction projects were used as a part of macroeconomic stimulation policies, especially during the Great depression (see New Deal). For economy of scale, whole suburbs, towns and cities, including infrastructure, are often planned and constructed within the same project (called megaproject if the cost exceeds US$1 billion), such as Brasília in Brazil, and the Million Programme in Sweden.

By the end of the 20th century, ecology, energy conservation and sustainable development had become important issues of construction.

References

 

How Will Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Power Our Future?

Pumped storage hydropower has proven to be an ideal solution to the growing list of challenges faced by grid operators.

As the transition to a clean energy future rapidly unfolds, this flexible technology will become even more important for a reliable, affordable and low carbon grid, write IHA analysts Nicholas Troja and Samuel Law.

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. That old adage, Murphy’s law, must seem appropriate for many power grid operators in 2020.

This year has tested the safe running and reliability of grids around the world like few others. Often termed ‘the biggest machine ever built,’ managing a power system, involving the coordination of complex and instantaneous interactions, is a formidable task at the best of times.

With the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on top of extreme weather events, greater penetrations of variable renewables and increasingly aged thermal assets, the task has only become more demanding in many markets.

These challenges have brought into sharp focus the growing need for energy storage, such as that offered by pumped storage hydropower.

Recent events highlight the need for pumped storage

Covid-19 continues to have an extraordinary impact on electricity markets. During the height of worldwide lockdowns, with large sections of the economy shutdown or greatly impaired, electricity demand declined by up to 30 per cent in some countries across Europe and in India.

As Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated, the demand drop “fast forwarded some power systems 10 years into the future” regarding integrating higher percentages of variable renewable energy (VRE) which receive priority dispatch to the grid. Managing periods of such low demand can create “significant operational risks” for grid operators. In some markets, this has led to curtailing, or shutting down, wind and solar facilities to stabilise the grid.

During such periods, pumped storage hydropower, with its ability to both store and generate large quantities of energy over long periods, was the first port of call for those grid operators lucky enough to have such stations on hand. In Britain, its four pumped storage stations were hailed by the Financial Times newspaper as the “first line of defence in the battle to keep Britain’s lights on”. Able to increase system demand by pumping water back up to their upper reservoir, pumped storage is a more cost-effective way of managing the grid than paying operators to curtail variable supply.

In August, the U.S. state of California experienced rolling blackouts for the first time since 2001 due to a combination of record heatwaves driving up demand, faltering gas-fired stations and a lack of dispatchable generation. As Stephen Berberich, President of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) said, “we thought there would be adequate power to supply the demand…we were wrong” and the costs to the Californian economy will be significant.

These managed blackouts provide yet another wake-up call for policymakers on the need to appropriately plan for a zero-emissions future. With limited balancing resources such as pumped storage, California’s grid did not have the flexibility to shift sufficient generating capacity to the evenings when the sun had set yet the demand remained high.

Given California’s aim of reaching 100 per cent clean electricity by 2045, mainly from wind and solar power which currently accounts for 20 per cent of generation, significant investment in flexible, low carbon balancing resources will be required.

In response, California is betting big on batteries for short-duration storage, from sub-seconds to up to four hours, to manage intraday variations in net load. However, with those high levels of VRE on the grid, long-duration storage, which can discharge for 10 hours or more at rated power, will be needed to accommodate the seasonal patterns of VREs. It will do so by shifting generation over days, weeks and months of supply and demand imbalance. This is a story that rings true for many countries across the world with ambitious climate targets.

Achieving California’s clean energy target is made even harder by the government’s decision to classify conventional hydropower stations greater than 30 MW as a non-renewable resource under its Renewables Portfolio Standard. This arbitrary classification is at odds with international consensus and penalises the state’s oldest source of affordable, flexible and low-carbon electricity.

Figure 1: Illustration of a closed-loop (off-river) pumped storage station and how it can be used support VRE.

Capabilities of pumped storage

With a total installed capacity of nearly 160 GW, pumped storage currently accounts for over 94 per cent of both storage capacity and stored energy in grid scale applications globally. This has earned pumped storage its name as the world’s “water battery”. It is a mature and reliable technology capable of storing energy for daily or weekly cycles and up to months, as well as seasonal applications, depending on project scale and configurations.

Pumped storage operates by storing electricity in the form of gravitational potential energy through pumping water from a lower to an upper reservoir (see figure 1). The result of this simple solution is a very high round-trip efficiency of 80 per cent, which compares favourably to other storage technologies.

Pumped storage tends to have high energy-to-power ratios and is well suited to provide long discharge durations at very low energy storage costs. Across different timescales, pumped storage can serve multiple functions (see figure 2). For example, at shorter discharge durations, it is suitable for ancillary services such as frequency balancing and back-up reserve.

With four to eight hours of discharge, it can provide daily shifting for day-night energy arbitrage. For longer durations over 10 hours, it can accommodate multi-day supply profile changes, reduce energy curtailment, replace peak generation capacity and provide transmission benefits.

Figure 2: The plot above visualises (logarithmic scale used) the estimated discharge durations relative to installed capacity and energy storage capacity for some 250 pumped storage stations currently in operation, based on information from IHA’s Pumped Storage Tracking Tool. The vast majority of pumped storage stations have a discharge duration longer than 6 hours, and some are capable of seasonal storage.

The majority of today’s pumped storage stations were built some forty years ago. Yet, they are still providing vital services to our power systems today. With occasional refurbishment, these long-term assets can last for many decades to come.

Despite being a mature technology, the resurgence of interest in pumped storage has brought forth numerous new R&D initiatives. One prominent example is the European Commission’s four-year XFLEX HYDRO project, which aims to develop new technological solutions to enhance hydropower’s flexibility. Latest innovations, such as variable speed turbines and smart digital operating systems, will be tested on a range of pumped storage demonstration sites.

While often thought of as geographically constrained, recent studies have identified vast technical potential for pumped storage development worldwide. Research by the Australian National University highlighted over 600,000 potential sites for low-impact off-river pumped storage development, including locations in California. There is also growing interest in retrofitting pumped storage at disused mines, underground caverns, non-powered dams and reservoir hydropower stations.                              

Seeking a path toward a clean, affordable and secure transition

California is a pioneer in the energy transition. Though many opponents of wind and solar have unfortunately used the blackouts as an example of why their rapid roll-out is a threat to a secure, reliable grid. As noted earlier, the blackouts were not due to too much VRE capacity being on the grid, but a lack of integrated planning to support an evolving electricity mix with sufficient dispatchable generation and storage.

The IEA recently stated that, dispatchable pumped storage, along with conventional hydropower, is the often overlooked workhorse of flexibility. However, its development, like many energy storage technologies, is currently being hampered by the lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks and market signals to reward its contribution to the grid. Outside China, year-on-year installed capacity growth has been anaemic at just 1.5 per cent since 2014 (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Global pumped storage installed capacity by region. Note that 2019 recorded the lowest growth in pumped storage capacity for over a decade, with only 304 MW added. Source: IHA’s database.

Given the technology’s long lead times, investment decisions are needed urgently to ensure that pumped storage, in conjunction with other low-carbon flexibility options, are available to grid operators without needing to rely on carbon-intensive gas-fired generation as a backup. This is especially important as VRE penetration reaches increasingly high levels not yet experienced on a regular basis.

IHA is continuing to work across the hydropower sector and is seeking to learn lessons from other sectors to support the development and deployment of pumped storage. Together with national authorities and multilateral development banks, we are developing a new global initiative to shape and enhance the role of the technology in future power systems.

Further information

Join our Hydropower Pro online community or sign-up to our email newsletter via our website homepage for latest developments.

To learn more about IHA and our work on pumped storage, please visit: www.hydropower.org/pumped-storage

To contact the authors please email nicholas.troja@hydropower.org and samuel.law@hydropower.org

Nick Troja is a Senior Hydropower Sector Analyst. His work focuses on building and sharing knowledge on global hydropower, including identifying trends in project financing, policies and market dynamics.

Before joining IHA, Nick worked for the UK’s steel industry focusing on the EU Emissions Trading System and the impact of other EU level climate change and energy policies on the sector. Prior to this he worked for the UK’s department of energy and climate change, covering a wide range of policy areas and as an adviser to the shadow minister for emissions trading and climate change in Canberra. He holds a bachelor’s degree in international business and master’s degree in public policy.  

Samuel Law is Hydropower Sector Analyst. His work focuses on building and sharing knowledge on sustainable hydropower development, working on topics such as clean energy systems, green financing mechanisms and regional hydropower development.

Samuel holds a master’s degree in environmental technology from Imperial College London and has a technical background in environmental engineering. Prior to joining IHA, he completed an internship with the United Nations in Bangkok. At the UN, he conducted research on Sustainable Development Goals, integrated resource management and collaborative governance, as well as supported project implementation and organised international conferences. He also has experience as a business intelligence analyst in London, where he conducted research on market dynamics and investment trends across industries.

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Australian Renewable Energy Agency

Like the hydroelectric power stations that have powered Tasmania for a century, a new generation of pumped hydro plants will play an important role in Australia’s future energy mix. With the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasting that 15 GW of large-scale storage will be needed by the early 2040s, pumped hydro is expected to operate alongside large-scale batteries and other energy storage technologies. Learn more about pumped hydro here – https://arena.gov.au/blog/how-could-p

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