These technologies first appeared in the late 19th century in Switzerland.
In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, one of the most economically developed regions in the east of the country, the full-scale commissioning of a pumped storage power station – PSPP – with the highest dam among such structures in the world has taken place.
The new PSPP is located in the city of Juyuan. It was built by a subsidiary of the State Grid Corporation of China. The total installed capacity of the station is 1.35 GW, and the annual electricity generation volume is 1.35 billion kWh at full capacity.
The upper reservoir for water storage can hold up to 17.07 million cubic meters of water. The dam of the reservoir has a height of 182.3 m, which is almost equal to the height of a 60-story building.
The first pumped storage power stations appeared in the late 19th century. For instance, in 1882, the Letten installation with two pumps with a total capacity of 103 kW was built in Switzerland, near Zurich. Twelve years later, a similar installation was put into operation at one of the Italian spinning mills. By the beginning of the 20th century, the total number of pumped storage power stations in the world did not exceed four, but by the early 1960s, it had reached 72, and by 2010 — 460. In the 1930s, reversible hydraulic units for pumped storage and tidal power plants became widespread, consisting of a pump-turbine (a hydraulic machine capable of operating in both pump and turbine modes) and a motor-generator (an electric machine operating in both motor and generator modes). Reversible hydraulic units use only reactive hydraulic turbines, whose efficiency is somewhat lower than that of unidirectional actively-reactive turbines.
As of 2017, China has the largest capacity of pumped storage power stations in the world: 32.0 GW. In terms of the ratio of pumped storage to total generating capacity, Switzerland ranks first with 32.6%.
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