On Feb 4, 7:44*pm, "Ralph Mowery" wrote:
wrote in message

...

Follow the example. *It doesn't require 100% efficiency. *You have a
river

that's flowing at 100MW an hour. *During the day, there is a market
for
all that power. *At night the demand is only 60MW. *So, you could let
that water pass by unused or use the 40MW available to pump water
to a reservoir above the power plant. *Then, during the day when you
need more than 100MW, you release some of that water. *You now
have more than 100MW of water availble to turn the generator
because you have EXTRA water beyond what the river supplies

during that peak period.
Hence you can produce more than 100MW of power during the
day when you need it.

That makes no sense at all. *You are saying let the water flow past the dam.
Then pump it back up to the top ? *It is not like getting the water down
stream 10 miles or more from the dam. *Why not just cut the flow back to the
demand for power.

That is fine IF you can cut the river flow back to equal demand
during periods of low demand. In some cases you can. In others
you may not be able to. And IF the river
upstream of the dam has a reservoir. What if it doesn't have a
reservoir, but there is a suitable location for a reservoir, even
higher up
a few miles away? Then do you recognize that the system as I
outlined would work and is not a violation of thermodynamics?
That was the essential point being argued here. You and krw
claim that it somehow violates thermodynamics. It doesn't.
All your doing is capturing the excess generating capacity and
storing it in the form of water at a higher elevation.