Potential for pumped-storage hydro power in Donegal?

[feargach]

It strikes me that Donegal has lots of highland reasonably close to the sea. So in theory, you could have thousands of megawatts being generated by offshore wind (off Donegal we have the strongest winds) and the power stored in multiple versions of the artificial reservoir which sits on Turlough Hill.

Turlough Hill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The planning laws would need to be changed so that such reservoirs could be built in a reasonable time frame, of course.

Can we discuss this in terms of practicalities? Maybe we have some engineers here.

[socialdemocrate]

its posible but your talking about a massive scale project, just imagine the thousands of NIMBYs and "enviromentalists" going ape over it

[feargach]

Well, with a constitutional referendum NIMBYs could be circumvented.

[BodyofEvidence]

Donegal - the place that gave us
Daniel O'donnel
Mary Coughlan
any number of Blaneys

About time it was converted to simething useful....

[socialdemocrate]

Well, with a constitutional referendum NIMBYs could be circumvented.

god dont say the CF word!

[wombat]

Turlough Hill is based on pumping water from one lake to another which is at a higher elevation - as far as I know, it is a unique location in Ireland, its also one of our bigger generating stations, 300 MW. I suspect that if there were other suitable sites, the ESB would be developing them as they are an answer to the problem if intermittant wind power.

[Wakeupcall]

There are about 30 wind turbines on top of barnessmore mountains in DOnegal town.. I hear tehre are plans for more

[droghedasouth]

Might work well if you could put the storage lake on top of Slieve League which has about a 300 metre drop.
Hard to see the GP agreeing though as no doubt there is some lesser spotted slug that lives there.

[wombat]

It strikes me that Donegal has lots of highland reasonably close to the sea. So in theory, you could have thousands of megawatts being generated by offshore wind (off Donegal we have the strongest winds)

There appears to be a commercial problem with offshore wind farms, there is no sign of the Arklow windfarm expanding, I have been unable to find out what the problem is - anyone know what the story is?

[seabhcan]

There appears to be a commercial problem with offshore wind farms, there is no sign of the Arklow windfarm expanding, I have been unable to find out what the problem is - anyone know what the story is?

I've wondered about that myself. They planned 200 turbines but only built 7.