The infrastructure cost is not nearly the burden that the regulatory process is. Building any kind of hydroelectric in the United States is a massive political and bureaucratic undertaking. If you plan on building pumped storage you better set aside a decade or two of constant effort to get through that process. Once you have that part done the actual building of it is comparatively simple. I am an engineer in hydro and would absolutely love the chance to be involved in more pumped storage projects but they are quite rare for that reason, despite being a perfect match for what our grid currently needs (much more storage!)
Pumped hydro is cool, but we already have more storage than we need, its called "not burning gas". And until we run out of opportunities to not burn gas, theres no real demand for storage. Hopefully well get there soon, but the more people say "we can't build more renewables until we have storage", the longer that is going to take.
I don't know how to respond to this comment. You seem to be saying that not burning natural gas would somehow negate the need for electrical storage on the grid? If that's what you're trying to say you're definitely incorrect, there's no real argument to be made otherwise. Not burning natural gas means that we need to supply more electricity for heating loads, typically at times that solar is less able to serve that load. This increases the need for storage if your assumption is that the load will be served by renewable sources and not, for example, by natural gas thermal generation. The physics of this are pretty simple and obvious, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Europe has lots of gas heaters, and gas electrical generation. Which means they can build lots of renewables without any need for storage. They just store the gas they would have burned when it's windy and sunny, and burn it when it's not.
Every gas heater replaced with a heat pump, increases this 'storage' capacity.
Until that stops being true, they have no real need for storage, just more renewables.
One cheap and effective way to do this, is to ban new gas hookups on newly built or refurbished buildings. This saves a lot of money. It sounds like NY is doing this, so good for them. Smart move New York.
