| Work Detail |
The Australian researchers who created the atlas took into account mining wells, lakes and waste ponds and located nearby reservoirs. The selected sites have a potential storage capacity of 30 TWh.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have created a global atlas of potential pumped hydro storage sites located in former mining areas.
“Mining deposits can be shaped during the final phases of exploitation to form a pumped hydroelectric reservoir,” explain the scientists, who point out that mining deposits are usually located close to the electrical grid and water pumping infrastructure. “In some cases, the cost of modeling would be similar to that of normal operations and therefore one (or even both) of the pairs of reservoirs on a brownfield site could be prepared at very low cost.”
In their initial analysis they included all suitable pits, lakes and tailings ponds within the mining sites and located nearby reservoirs. They then used Geographic Information System (GIS) and Forest And Buildings removed Copernicus DEM (FABDEM) analysis to investigate the suitability of 9,424 sites for pumped hydro storage activities. This process led to the identification of 904 sites in 77 different countries, which were included in the so-called Brownfield Atlas.
“None of the sites located by the algorithm used a mining site as an upper reservoir,” the academics specify. “Mining sites may also require consideration of water quality, unstable steep slopes within the reservoir, land use restrictions imposed by environmental regulations, mining rights and future mining potential.”
The research group explained that the new database is an expansion of the Greenfield Atlas they developed in 2021. This atlas included 616,818 locations around the world that could be suitable sites for 23.1 million GWh of pumped hydroelectric storage capacity. . In previous work published in April 2019, the same research group had identified 530,000 locations for 22 million GWh of pumped hydro storage capacity.
The Brownfield Atlas was featured in the study “ A global atlas of pumped hydro systems that repurpose existing mining sites,” recently published in Renewable Energy . |
