![]() “It’s not a power plant - it’s really a switch,” says GE project director Fabien Scheurer. When the grid suddenly has more power than it needs, Nant de Drance can react almost as quickly, taking six minutes to go from producing power to pumping water back uphill to the Vieux Emosson reservoir. ![]() While a coal-fired power plant takes more than four hours to start up, and a combined-cycle gas turbine two to three hours, Nant de Drance’s pump-turbines can start churning out 900 megawatts in just 100 seconds. In addition to making the grid more efficient, the variable-speed machines are themselves more efficient than their fixed-speed cousins, capturing more potential energy when producing power and using less electricity to pump uphill.īecause Nant de Drance will be both pumping and generating power on a frequent basis, it needs to be fast - and it is. But unlike conventional pumped storage plants where the power of each pump can’t be adjusted, Nant de Drance’s variable-speed pump-turbines and motor-generators allow perators to pump precisely the amount of energy the electrical grid wants to offload, so the region’s wind and solar power aren’t wasted - on the contrary, they’re highly valorized. All pumped storage plants can control how much energy they feed into the grid at any given moment by adjusting the flow of water down the hill. But Nant de Drance puts a new twist on this theme, showing how the latest technology can play a central role in the push toward renewable energy on the grid. The idea of using a lake as a battery by pumping water into it dates as far back as the late 19th century. ![]() There it can be stored until shops and plants open up for business when the workweek starts. When the grid has too much electricity - say, on a windy summer weekend when people are off work and factories are closed - the plant soaks up the extra power by reversing the process and pumping water uphill back to the upper reservoir. Pulled down by gravity, the rushing water spins turbines that produce electricity. The plant generates power by releasing water through a waterway from Lac du Vieux Emosson to Lac d’Emosson, located roughly 1,100 feet below. That’s where batteries like Nant de Drance come in. Renewables are intermittent - plentiful only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing - so to completely replace fossil fuels, they’ll need to be able to meet energy demands around the clock and maintain the grid’s delicate balance of supply and demand. Such projects, known as pumped storage plants because they store electricity as water’s potential energy by pumping it uphill, are becoming increasingly important as countries start including ever more renewables in their energy mixes. But first impressions can be misleading: The twin bodies of water are central components of Nant de Drance, one of the world’s most ingenious batteries, which entered commissioning phase in August. I've found 9, 10 and 11 to be the most difficult to arrange birthdays personally as 12 and after there seems a very definite idea of what is ok, under 8 it's fairly obvious too but those middle years are awkward.Īlso I think it depends on what % of guests are family vs friends- we had a huge bouncy castle hired for my uncles 65th birthday the other year and everyone had a blast from my then 2 & 3 year olds right up to my mid-fifties father! (I had to sit out being pg.Two crystal-clear blue lakes in the Swiss canton of Valais, Lac d’Emosson and Lac du Vieux Emosson, look at first glance like any number of local glacier-fed tarns, surrounded by mountains and crystalline air blowing down the slopes of nearby Mont Blanc. For girls I'd say probably too old- my eldest daughter is 11 on thursday and her cousin is having a indoor play (ball pit, trampolines, tunnels, big winding slides, climbing frames etc etc) next weekend and she's happier to go as the camera-woman, the one she went to before that (also family- she's oldest cousin by 5 years then there's 9 others in under 5 years) and although she went in she was very, very adament we didn't tell her friends she'd been to one, she's not normally a kid who worries about what others think either.īoys I think you can stretch it out a little longer and it also depends on the nature of your sons social group, some of the "cooler" kids might take pleasure in picking on someone for having a party they consider a younger kid thing but then other boys that age won't.
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