World's Largest Batteries - (Pumped Storage)

Why HN readers recommended it

Recommended as a clear explanation of pumped hydro and its limits in energy storage discussions.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Practical Engineering

Topic

pumped hydro storage

Format

explainer

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

4

HN mentions in dataset

5

Recommendation years in dataset

2020–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• I'd say it's a quite big one, "every city" has water towers to provide pressure to the people living in it, or they rely on the water source if it's higher up than the city. There are probably exceptions, where this isn't true, but raised …

• As I understand it, the main challenge with pumped storage is that you can't do it everywhere. You need fairly specific geography for it, and it's a big civil engineering project. Here's a good video on by Practical Engineering: [VIDEO]

• You could start by just calculating the potential energy of the volume of the tank you are considering, and the difference in elevation between the reservoirs (volume x 1 kg/L x gravity x elevation difference, plug in the units of your choice and let google …