Can Pumped-Storage Hydro be Jump-Started by Thinking Small?

July 15, 2022--Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas) -- Hearing speakers discuss hydropower, including pumped-storage hydro (PSH), at HYDROVISION INTERNATIONAL 2020, one was reminded of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of the American Dream: a glorious past, an exciting future, but a dreary present.

The dreary present, of course, is the industry's inability to build new hydro or PSH projects, despite rising concern over global climate change and the carbon-free goals of the Biden administration, which seeks to decarbonize the electricity business by 2035, and the U.S. economy by 2050.The last utility-scale PSH project in the U.S. was built in Georgia in the 1990s.