Norway – a “green” battery?

A German government commission suggests making Germany’s electricity renewable by using Norwegian hydropower as a “battery”. The Germans want Norway to export Norwegian hydroelectricity to the North European grid when there is little wind, and use cheap surplus wind-power to pump water back into the Norwegian dams when the demand for electricity is low.

This would require Norway to build pumped-storage hydroelectric stations, which incorporate a turbine that can be used as a pump and then be reversed to generate electricity.

CEDREN, one of Norway’s eight national centres for research on environmentally friendly energy, is studying what would be needed to implement the construction of pumped-storage power stations on a large scale.