Australia Combines Solar and Pumped Storage at Abandoned Gold Mine Site

September 14, 2016 – For more than a century Kidston, Australia was a gold mining town but in 2001 that all came to an end. The mine shut down and what was left were the remnants of the open pit operations, two large quarries at different elevations (see image below).

Genex Power, a New South Wales-based company is in the process of taking the abandoned mine site located in Queensland and transforming it to generate hydroelectric power using a technology called pumped storage.

Back in 2013 I wrote about a proposed pumped storage project located at the site of an abandoned open pit mine in Ontario. That has yet to be realized but the conceptual description of how this technology works was well described in that posting. If you have not had the opportunity to read it, simply put, pumped storage replicates what nature can provide when we harvest the energy of falling water. Hydroelectric power, a technology that has been with us for more than a century, uses natural occurrences of water falling from higher elevations to lower ones to capture energy using spinning turbines that connect to generators which in turn feed power lines.

In pumped storage water from a low elevation uphill to one that is higher. The energy consumed in the process is provided a low use off peak periods. The gained energy potential gets released during peak demand providing additional power to the grid. Genex has had very little to do in adapting the existing quarries for this purpose. The water supplied has come from a nearby dammed river.

The pumped storage is just one part of a much larger energy scheme. The Kidston Solar Project built on site takes advantage of an area in Australia designated to be an optimal solar exposure zone throughout the year. The solar project is being built in two phases. Phase One will include an array of panels generating 145 Gigawatts of renewable energy annually. Phase Two will provide triple the capacity, quadrupling solar energy generated from the site. The solar power generated will be the energy source used to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir creating a closed loop system.

States Simon Kidston, Executive Director of Genex, and a descendant of the founder of the mine upon which this power project is built, “We’re not aware of any examples anywhere else in the world where there is a large pumped storage system, or any efficient storage mechanism, with a renewable generation component attached to it – not on the scale we’re talking about.” The abandoned mine infrastructure combined with solar exposure rating of the site has made this an ideal locale for combining the two technologies. Total cost to build has been less than $300 million in Australian currency. Completion date is 2018.

There are many more sites in Australia with similar configurations, former working open pit mines that can be adapted in this fashion. There are equally similar sites in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia where pump storage could prove to be an invaluable renewable energy source. And that is not the only way pumped storage can be configured. For example, cooling towers like the one in the image below, found in association with coal-fired and nuclear power plants, could be utilized in pumped storage renewable energy projects after their existing usage ends. As coal-fired plants close this may be an excellent way to repurpose these sites considering they already are linked to power transmission networks.