Someone should look seriously at Red Hill and do more than this napkin math. 140 MWh of high-efficiency storage that reuses existing infrastructure isn't something that should be dismissed out of hand.
Back in World War II, the American military had a problem, the same one the Russians are facing today. It needed absurd amounts of fuel for its military efforts, and aboveground tanks were huge, stationary, thin-skinned targets full of flammable material. So the US military started digging underground caverns for its fuel supplies near bases where it could and using gravity to run the fuel down to the base.
. This became an issue in 2014 when operations staff managed to spill 27,000 gallons of jet fuel while refilling the facility. That led to a bunch of soil and water table testing, and unsurprisingly found that decades of fossil fuels had left elevated levels of unhealthy hydrocarbons in the ecosystem. Drinking water remained within federal and state health standard levels.
Today someone reached out to me to ask about one potential use they’d thought up, which is to repurpose the caverns for pumped hydro storage of electricity. Up until the point the question was asked, I had no idea the facility existed. Twenty seconds of reading suggested that the site was more likely to be a new Superfund site requiring decades of remediation rather than something you wanted to flush water through regularly. My opinion hasn’t necessarily changed, but I kept going.
But the excavated caverns themselves were 30 meters underground. Hard to bomb, don’t you know. So the maximum head height was only about 74 meters. Of course, with 20 unconnected tanks, the water level doesn’t drop equally as it does in a normal reservoir, which is probably something you’d want to fix with cross tunnels if this were to become a thing. However, the tanks are reportedly big enough to accommodate a 20-story building, in other words about 280 feet or 86 meters.
We have the mass of the roughly billion liters of water which is a billion kilograms, because in the actually useful metric system primary units of measurement are related to one another intentionally. Mass times gravity times height gives us a very big number in joules, and when we convert that to megawatt hours we get just under 140 MWh of electricity storage.
But sea water is much nastier to mechanical equipment than fresh water. A lot more minerals, salt being an obvious one, that build up on things. And a lot more microscopic life that loves to cling to things to create a slurry that slightly bigger things can grow on and so on until you have a mass of barnacles and other shell fish with trailing seaweed through which you can vaguely see whatever was there in the first place.
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