Norway as a “green battery”?

A government-appointed committee in Germany wants to make the country’s electricity sources renewable by using the Norwegian hydropower network as a “battery.”

The Germans want Norway to pour electricity from hydropower into the grid in northern Europe when winds are calm and wind turbines are still – and when electricity demands are low, to use a surplus of cheap wind power to pump water back into Norwegian hydro reservoirs again.

In Norway, this would require the construction of what are called pump power stations. These would have a turbine that can be used as a pump, which could also be reversed to produce electricity. Cedren, the Centre for the Environmental Design of Renewable Energy, one of eight Norwegian national research centres for environmentally friendly energy, is studying what is needed to realize the large-scale development of these pump power stations.