Enhanced-Pumped-Storage: Combining pumped-storage in a yearly storage cycle with dams in cascade in Brazil

Julian David Hunt, Marcos Aurélio Vasconcelos Freitas and Amaro Olímipio Pereira Junior

Energy, 2014, vol. 78, issue C, 513-523

Abstract: The new frontier for hydropower electricity generation in Brazil, the Amazon region, cannot be used for energy storage as the construction of storage reservoirs would have deep environmental and social impacts, thus run-of-the-river dams have been built instead. If Brazil still wants to generate 80% of its electricity from hydropower, there is the need to increase the country's energy storage capacity so that the excess generation coming from the dams in the Amazon region during the wet period can be used during the dry period. This article presents four ways to increase the storage capacity of a watershed. The most innovative alternative involves a large-scale pumped-storage site combined with a series of hydropower dams in cascade, which could store energy by pumping water to a new reservoir during the wet period and generate energy by releasing the stored water during the dry period. Even though pumped storage schemes have an average efficiency of around 75%, it has been calculated that the combination of a pumped storage site and a series of hydroelectric dams in cascade can increase the overall storage efficiency up to 90% and double the storage capacity of a watershed. This scheme was called EPS (Enhanced-Pumped-Storage).

Keywords: Pumped-storage; Energy storage; Amazon dams (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214011888
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:78:y:2014:i:c:p:513-523

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2014.10.038

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().