Reminds me of the

Great Battery of Kimberley

doodle of a Diary I did a while ago....

Wherever there's a big hole, there's potential...

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

... storage hydro, where from what I understand you need a good drop of somewhere around 100m or more for each of the units to be effective, and steeper is by and large better from a capital cost standpoint. I believe there are suitable drops in a number of areas of west Texas from the Llano Estacado on west.

Traditional pumped hydro has to be either added to an existing hydropower facility or faces far higher regulatory hurdles than modular pumped storage hydro would, since traditional pumped hydro has to be connected into the watershed.

You raise an important point. The power industry has demands for power generation that focus on what is most convenient to the power industry, and sets aside costs external to the market, such as reckless experimentation with the world's climate or exposure to risks of political sabotage. It is the responsibility of government to impose the framework upon the power industry that ensures that it can pursue its own commercial interest without acting counter to the public interest .. that reflects those external costs to the power industry so that it pursue the lower full cost technology rather than the strongest free ride technology.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.