> Indeed, but we don't need it everywhere — between transmission lines and that most of the good sites in Germany are pretty close to the major industry and population centres
1. Not everywhere, but you need quite a lot of them. You significantly underestimate how much power modern civilisation consumes
2. You can't build a hydroelectric plant/storage in the marshes. You can't build it willy-nilly in any river you want, either. You can't just build it on any lake or in any mountains you like.
> I might be overestimating power lines or people's willingness to have transmission lines near them.
The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
The problem is that yo uneed to build a lot of them, and you can't just build them abywhere you want.
> What's the ampacity of a typical high voltage line?
Zero. The storage capacity of a high voltage line is zero.
> The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
Needless pedantry as everyone uses transmission lines so that power creation and storage aren't in the same physical location as the end use.
If you've got a 5 GW line going from Berlin to, say, the Czech border (where there's currently already a 1 GW hydro plant, I make no claims about environmental capacity for more even though it seems plausible at first glance), then you've got hydro storage keeping the lights on in the city even though it's 215 km away because there's nowhere here to put any hydro storage.
That's why it matters what the amp-acity of a HV line is.
1. Not everywhere, but you need quite a lot of them. You significantly underestimate how much power modern civilisation consumes
2. You can't build a hydroelectric plant/storage in the marshes. You can't build it willy-nilly in any river you want, either. You can't just build it on any lake or in any mountains you like.
There's a high-level overview here: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...