You know how you can spend your whole life never encountering something and then as soon as you learn about it, you immediately stumble across it again?
Well, this week in an interview with the president of Eversource (the story is about regulation and financing, alas, not tech stuff), the question of pumped storage came up – that is, pumping water up a hillside to store potential energy and then letting it flow down through turbines to generate electricity, as a form of battery – and we learned that there’s a huge (5 billion gallon) pumped storage atop a small mountain near the Connecticut River, built in the 1960s to store power from Vermont Yankee. It can generate 1,200 megawatts, roughly the output of Seabrook Station nuclear plant.
Cool, we thought – we should do a story about it. But the very next day, WBUR public radio did the story, getting a tour inside the usually closed facility. It’s a good piece, with some nice photos: You can listen or read the transcript here.
The facility has also made a YouTube video about its operation that’s pretty good.
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