Location of seawater pumped storage hydropower plants: Case of Morocco

Energy transition consists of developing new energy strategies to diversify the power grid portfolio. However, these strategies depend in one hand to the available energy sources and technology maturity. Energy storage is one option to manage the power flow, grid interconnections and increase the social welfare for communities. Marine energy not yet well deserved to produce energy in Africa. In this potential study, we focus to locate suitable sites for seawater pumped storage systems in Morocco. The results were promising with high energy storage potentials. For medium hydropower storage plants, 11 sites were selected and for very high heights, 4 sites were selected. The available energy storage is at about 300 MWh depending on site geography and the chosen surface. The main tool used for this work, is the GIS with the open-source software QGIS and the academic version of Visual PROMETHEE software. Energy storage ranking showed that hydrogen can be a good option to store energy in the coming decades where flywheel has a cost competitive advantage regarding the other options. Compressed air and pumped storage stay on the middle of GAIA results. Copyright (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.