Earl Bardsley: Could a pumped hydro scheme free NZ from fossil fuel power and enable the green transition?
Economy Watch
English - September 28, 2022 18:00 - 24 minutes - 22.4 MBInvesting Business investment business finance currency economy shares investing new zealand Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In 2005 Earl Bardsley wrote an article published in the Journal of Hydrology highlighting the possibility and potential of a pumped hydro storage reservoir at Lake Onslow in Central Otago.
Fifteen years later Energy and Resources minister Megan Woods announced $30 million had been allocated to develop a business case to tackle New Zealand's dry year storage problem. This would mostly focus on a pumped hydro storage project at Lake Onslow.
Bardsley, Honorary Associate Professor at Waikato University's School of Science, talks about the Lake Onslow pumped hydro concept in the latest episode of interest.co.nz's Of Interest Podcast.
Should it go ahead the project would be a massive public infrastructure project taking years to complete, impact the local environment, and cost billions of dollars. Effectively it would involve soring energy like a battery, Bardsley says.
Water would be pumped up to a high elevation from the Clutha River and stay there until it's needed.
"So the energy is stored in the form of gravitational potential energy," says Bardsley.
The potential volume of water held, the capacity for generating power, and the actual energy stored would be massive. As potentially would be the impact on electricity supply and storage.
"I think the key selling point would be that it's an enabler to get rid of fossil fuel power generation, and secondly more than that it's an enabler of the green transition. So we can actually go ahead and move into EVs, maybe green hydrogen, because it's just not obvious to me that there are other mechanisms around by which we can actually do that," says Bardsley.
Part of the NZ Battery Project under the oversight of the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, advice on technical, commercial and environmental feasibility studies of the Lake Onslow option is scheduled to be provided to Cabinet in December.
There's more from Bardsley on the Lake Onslow proposal here.