The Anonymous Widower

Plan For £8.25m Plymouth Energy Plant To Generate Power From Cream-Like Fluid

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on PlymouthLive.

These two paragraphs outline the project.

Plymouth’s Hemerdon tungsten mine has been chosen as the site of a pioneering £8.25m hydro energy plant which would see a cream-like fluid used to generate electricity. London-based renewable energy company RheEnergise wants to start construction of the High-Density Hydro storage system at the Plympton site as early as summer 2023.

The company has already spoken to the parish council and is to submit plans to Devon County Council soon. It hopes permission will be given and the site will be in operation by the end of 2023 and then trialled for two years before the technology is rolled out nationally and worldwide.

Note.

1. RheEnergise has a web page, which describes how their High-Density Hydro storage system works.
2. The system is sized at 250kW/1MWh and is described in the article as a demonstrator plant.
3. In the future, rojects will range from 5MW to 100MW of power and can work with vertical elevations as low as 100m or less.

This sentence from the article lays out the potential of the system.

RheEnergise’s analysis of potential project opportunities has indicated there are about 6,500 possible sites in the UK, about 115,000 in Europe, about 345,000 in North America and about 500,000 in Africa and the Middle East.

This method of storing energy could be very useful.

Where Is Hemerdon Tungsten Mine?

This is a Google Map of the Plymouth area.

The red arrow indicates the Hemerdon Tungsten Mine, which has a Wikipedia entry as Drakelands Mine, where this is said about the last three years.

Tungsten West plc, which floated on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market on 21 October 2021,[49] have taken over the mine. They have conducted a review starting from the basics, of what is required to fix the problems that caused Wolf Minerals to fail. A better understanding of the mineralogy, with associated changes to the processing stream, and aggregate sales should lead to the mine re-opening at scale in 2022.

Tungsten West’s share price has had an up-and-down day. But are they adding energy storage to their income streams?

From the map, it does seem to be a possibility.

November 29, 2022 - Posted by AnonW | Energy, Energy Storage | Devon, Long-Duration Electricity Storage Alliance, Plymouth, RheEnergise