Elevation delta is not hard to find in Norway! A typical pumped storage facility uses 100m of delta; I imagine Norwegian ones would use more.
> but this is a field where capex + opex/KWH is everything.
And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
The original post is efficient for heat storage, but converting low grade heat to electricity is not efficient.
Most projects seek 200-600m. This map doesn't even consider pumped hydro <200m: https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
Based on what? Cost is particularly variable for pumped hydro. It can be one of the cheaper options when stars align. But you need 1) a suitable geography that minimizes the cost of damming or digging a resivoir with sufficient head 2) available for development without too much backlash 3) Near enough grid resources to minimize infrastructure and line losses. I'm surely leaving pieces out.
It can be cheap, but it has far more hoops to jump than alternatives like batteries, hot sand and other "storage-in-a-building" designs which can be built where needed and using fairly standard industrial construction.
On the hardware side you can run some benchmarks on the hardware (or use other people's benchmarks) and get an idea of the tokens/second you can get from the machine. Normalize this for your usage pattern (and do your best to implement batch processing where you are able to, which will save you money on both methods) and you have a basic idea of how much it would cost per token.
Then you compare that to the cost of something like GPT5, which is a bit simpler because the cost per (million) token is something you can grab off of a website.
You'd be surprised how much money running something like DeepSeek (or if you prefer a more established company, Qwen3) will save you over the cloud systems.
That's just one factor though. Another is what hardware you can actually run things on. DeepSeek and Qwen will function on cheap GPUs that other models will simply choke on.