When and if it gets built the Valhalla project will consist of a 600 MW solar farm and a 300 MW pumped hydro plant which, it is claimed, will in combination deliver continuous baseload power to Northern Chile. If the project works as planned it will indeed deliver continuous baseload power, but only enough to fill about 5% of Northern Chile’s baseload demand. However, it would be the first to demonstrate that baseload power can be generated from a utility-scale PV plant. Development is presently on hold while Valhalla seeks $1.2 billion in financing. (Inset: Valhalla’s solar farm.)
The Valhalla project will send intermittent generation from the 600 MW Cielos de Tarapacá solar PV farm to the 300 MW Espejo de Tarapacá pumped hydro plant in order to convert it into baseload power. I touched on it in my 2016 solar in Chile post, and here I subject it to a more detailed review.
The pumped hydro plant
Valhalla’s pumped hydro plant is often claimed to be new technology because it uses the sea as the lower reservoir (there being no other option in the Atacama Desert). It is, however, preceded by the Yanbaru pumped hydro plant on Okinawa, Japan, a 30MW plant that used the sea as the lower reservoir. No details on Yanbaru’s performance are readily available, but the plant operated for 17 years between 1999 and 2016 and in fact went into commercial operation in or around 2003. Yanbaru’s purpose was to supply balancing services to the Okinawa grid (it was decommissioned in 2016 because of lack of demand) rather than convert large volumes of intermittent solar to baseload, but the fact that it operated for so long (and won a number of awards) suggests that seawater/pumped hydro technology can be regarded as at least partially proven.
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