Pumped storage: a new project for Wales

With the highest mountain in Wales as its centerpiece, Snowdonia’s natural beauty is a magnet for some six million visitors a year. The same glaciated geology that helps make Snowdonia so valued as a wild place also makes it attractive as a location for grid-scale electricity storage.

Dinorwig, currently Britain’s largest pumped storage scheme at 1.7GW, was built there on the northern shore of Llyn Padarn near the town of Llanberis. But that was 30 years ago. It seems astonishing to many involved in the energy sector that despite Britain’s dash for wind and solar, with all that their intermittency implies for grid instability and wasteful constraint arrangements, that three decades should have passed without the creation of further grid-scale storage. Yet that is indeed Britain’s record. While other countries were building storage to mitigate the grid instability caused by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar, successive British governments have been unaccountably blind to this need.