Aug 30, 2026 - Why engineers are turning abandoned mines into giant batteries
There`s a hole in the ground in North Queensland that spent ninety years producing gold. Now it`s being converted into a 250 MW pumped hydro plant, storing roughly 2,000 megawatt-hours by moving water between two old mine pits. Pumped hydro is already the largest form of grid-scale storage on the planet, bigger than every battery installation combined, and engineers are now eyeing hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines as ready-made sites. We look at how it works, why old mines are attractive, and the structural and water-chemistry problems that make it harder than just flooding a pit.
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