Feasibility of a hidden renewable energy hydro power storage battery

•Pragmatic research ideology, mixed.•Methods (qualitative and parametric techniques) with embedded case study.•Totally underground 240 gigawatt pumped hydroelectricity storage facility in abandoned iron ore mine.•Relevant best-practices cited from literature and from comparative field research projects.•Smart city aesthetically hidden hydro electricity storage solution.•Easy to use scalable open software spreadsheet-based decision making model developed.•Operational certainty (risk) factor created based on 37 comparable pumped hydro plants.•Monte Carlo simulation (1000 iterations) used to develop a probability distribution for estimating future operational certainty and statistically proven to be likely to occur 95 out of 100 years.

Global demand for clean renewable electricity is increasing. Although hydroelectricity is clean and renewable, storing excess energy during non-peak times in batteries usually causes negative impacts to the environment and may trigger legal or land use issues. Additionally, voltaic-based batteries are prohibitively expensive for storing the amount of electricity even for a small village. Actually it is a lot cheaper and cleaner to store electricity in water. This study explores how to do that. It features a unique pragmatic research ideology that included a literature review, comparative field research, data collection from the site, along with parametric statistical techniques. Relevant best-practices were cited from the literature and from comparative field research projects. A novel concept was the use of a land fault between lakes in a large park preserve. A scalable decision making model was developed for generating and storing clean renewable energy. The results should generalize widely to renewable energy storage practitioners, climate conservation activists, government policy makers and to other researchers around the world.