Fossil fuel giant faces uphill push to build green mega-project: Don Pittis

Source: Don Pittis · CBC NEWS · | July 27, 2020

Pipeline company turns its skills to pumped hydro to create new value from existing power plants

TC Power, the company building Keystone XL, wants to pump water up to a new reservoir on this height of land overlooking Ontario's Georgian Bay as a way of storing electricity until it is needed. (Don Pittis/CBC)

On the face of it, the scheme sounds like a winner. 

Like a kind of arbitrage, it takes inexpensive electricity and turns it into expensive electricity. And it saves billions of dollars that would otherwise be spent building new generating capacity.

Unlike other projects to store cheap electricity and release it during periods of high demand, the current proposal by TC Energy, a company better known to Canadians by its former name TransCanada Corporation, the Keystone pipeline builder, is more than just a green experiment.

Using proven technology, the energy giant wants to leverage its engineering skills to build an enormous reservoir on a hilltop plateau not far from Ontario's Blue Mountain ski resort and then use cheap overnight electricity to pump water up and out of Lake Huron.

"Regardless of what technology you use, the principle of energy storage is the same," said Sarah Petrevan, policy director with Clean Energy Canada, a research group at Simon Fraser University that has no association with the TC Energy project.

"You take surplus electricity and you store it because you have extra and you don't need it, and you can draw on it when you do need it."

Low carbon storage

In the case of the TC Energy plan, the storage will be in the form of "pumped hydro," creating the potential energy similar to that of water behind a dam, that can be released to drive turbines, turning the energy back into electricity.