Germany being the highest contributor of greenhouse house emissions in the EU has already made it clear that, to meet the country’s electricity demands, they would be only using renewable sources by 2050. That ambitious yet conscientious statement certainly reflects on their green investment particularly in the fields of solar and wind energy. But now rather notching up a sustainable level, Marko Schmidt, an industrial engineer for the Energy Research Centre of Lower Saxony (EFZN), has carried out a study that makes pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants feasible when constructed fully under ground.
Basically, pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants utilize solar or wind energy to pump a certain volume of water from one tank to another above it (against gravity). Now, when the scenario demands (that is when sunlight or wind is not available), the water from the top is released to the bottom tank pressurizing and pushing through turbines as it goes down (this time with the help of gravity) and generating power.
Now, six of such large scale projects have been proposed for the West Harz region. One among them (in Bad Grund) will have the storage capacity of 400 megawatt hours, which is sufficient to allocate power to over 40,000 households per day. Moreover, the significant advantages in these cases are that many of such plants can be constructed in abandoned mine-shafts, littering the area. This, in effect, has minimal visual impact on the overhead landscape, normally associated with those cumbersome wind turbines. Also the provision of additional green jobs cannot certainly be disregarded at the end of the day.
Source: TheLocal
