In its bid to make the Winter Olympics “green and clean”, China turned on the world’s largest pumped hydro storage plant. The $3bn (18.96bn yuan), 3.6GW Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station in Hebei Province will provide 600MW of electricity to the host cities Beijing and Zhangjiakou – avoiding the equivalent of burning 480,000 tonnes of coal a year and reducing CO2 emissions by 1.2 million tonnes.
The Chinese State Grid Corporation opened another five pumped hydro stations last year and plans to increase its pumped storage capacity from the current 26.3GW to 100GW by 2030. All over the world, grid operators are desperately searching for long-duration energy storage solutions to leverage renewable energy as baseload power and address the variable nature of clean resources.
“[Pumped hydro] will play a significant role in supporting the deployment of variable energy sources, as other storage solutions alone cannot provide adequate storage and sufficient grid flexibility,” says François Le Scornet, a senior consultant at Carbonexit Consulting. “The demand for pumped storage can be expected to grow quite significantly over the coming decades.”
