Old-Fashioned Tech Copes With Surges in Clean Energy Demand
- Editor OGN Daily
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
You know how one of the forever-complaints against renewables is that they can’t respond to fluctuating energy needs? Well...
Even environmentalists thought that we would always need a little coal or oil, to be dropped like fat on the fire when the grid needed sudden generation to meet surprise demand. Except it turns out old-fashioned hydropower can serve that purpose, and in fact people have known that for ages.
In Wales, twin gravity-powered hydro plants Ffestiniog and Dinorwig have been providing on-the-spot electricity during power surges for 62 and 41 years respectively. Concealed in Elidir Fawr mountain is Dinorwig Power Station, also known as Electric Mountain, its unremarkable entrance giving few clues about the complex within. The Central Electricity Generating Board - the national body responsible for electricity generation in England and Wales from 1958 until the industry was privatised in the 1990s - oversaw the power station’s development, which was opened by Prince Charles in 1984.
During the twentieth century, there was an increasing need for an infrastructure network that could cope with short-term peaks in energy. Power surges became commonplace, for example the ‘TV pickups’ caused by millions of viewers putting on the kettle during the half time of a big football match.
Hence the need for Dinorwig. It can be called upon to generate electricity within 75 seconds by releasing 325,000 litres of water per second down a cavernous 500-metre vertical tunnel. The water crashes into six turbines, each weighing about 500 tonnes, which generate high-volume blasts of renewable power on demand.
The power station continues to innovate and evolve, now also acting as a sustainable power ‘battery’ for other forms of renewable energy such as wind and solar. Better yet, with wind and solar now regularly generating surplus power to pump those gallons of water higher, both Ffestiniog and Dinorwig are being refurbished so they can keep on keeping the lights on... without any gas, oil or coal.
