LSH Consulting Engineers S.A.C.Experience. Quality. Engineering.
Guiding our clients in successfull decision making since 2004
LSH offers end-to-end solutions from a project’s inception through to supervision of the project’s execution phase. Our expertise spans renewable energy projects, energy storage systems, water transmission and irrigation systems, intakes, and underground works such as tunnels and caverns.
Our services cover:
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- Due diligence, conceptual design, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, detailed design, tender documentation, works supervision.
- Rehabilitation and optimization of hydraulic and underground structures.
- Probabilistic Risk Assessments of project specific technical, macro/micro economic and financial parameters based on Monte Carlo Risk Analysis.
- Forensic engineering for insurance evaluations and expert witness services in legal settings, such as ICC arbitrations.
LSH is fully owned by the founding family. We have no affiliations to suppliers and financial institutions.
Articles in Focus
To Store Renewable Energy, Some Look to Old Mines
“ADELAIDE, Australia—Mining operations that contributed to greenhouse-gas emissions could soon help to cut them.
Around the world, companies are seeking to repurpose old mines as renewable-energy generators using a century-old technology known as pumped-storage hydropower. The technology, already part of the energy mix in many countries, works like a giant battery, with water and gravity as the energy source. Water is pumped uphill to a reservoir when energy supply is plentiful. It is released and flows downhill through turbines generating hydroelectric power when electricity demand is high or there are shortages of other types of power. Finally, the water is captured to be pumped uphill again in a repeated cycle.
Surface and underground mines hold potential as reservoirs for the water, and could be developed with a lower environmental impact and upfront costs than building such plants from scratch, experts say.
Proposals for pumped-storage hydropower projects in Australia, the U.S. and other markets are gaining momentum, fueled by accelerating investment in renewables and by energy-security concerns following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and recent spikes in electricity prices.
“It seems like it’s easier to raise money for pumped hydro than it is for a gold project at the moment,” says Jake Klein, executive chairman of Evolution Mining Ltd., an Australian gold producer”.
– Rhiannon Hoyle, WALL STREET JOURNAL
New Technology Lets Farmers Use Land for Both Solar Panels and Crops
“Farmers wanting to install solar panels on their land, for their own use or to sell the energy, have had a tough choice: use the land for crops or for panels. Now, they are increasingly able to do both.
Researchers say that this concept of agrivoltaics—being able to grow crops on the same land where solar panels are in use—will not only free up limited farmland for multiple simultaneous uses but also contribute to the emissions reductions in the U.S. targeted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Farmers installing solar panels on their land traditionally have kept their paneled acres separate from those containing their crops. But this is becoming less appealing as land for farming becomes scarcer and its value soars. Farmland in the U.S. has contracted nearly 25% since the 1950s, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it is selling for record prices.
Agrivoltaics currently accounts for just a sliver of the world’s total solar-energy capacity, at roughly 2.9 gigawatts at the end of 2020, according to research firm Fitch Solutions. That capacity is expected to grow to more than 10 gigawatts by 2030, or the equivalent of more than 3,000 wind turbines, according to the U.S. Department of Energy—still a tiny portion of global solar-energy capacity. Worldwide, just over 1,000 gigawatts of solar capacity has been installed, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
“This is a nascent area,” says David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute”.
– Kirk Maltais, WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Oversupply of Electrical Generation
“The recurring news in the salmon-colored paper press is that more electricity generation is not needed, that there is an oversupply and that even the finished concession contract of the Southern Peruvian Gas Pipeline should not be reactivated, as it is unnecessary.
I do not perceive from the Ministry of Energy and Mines a serious analysis of the supply and demand relationship until the end of the current government and what the head of the ministry expresses is only an echo of what the press mentions.
The increase in the supply to be considered until the end of the current government’s mandate must be based on the generation units already contracted to be built. In those terms, we will only have new power inputs until 2020, when we will have 13,727 MW, a figure that will remain unchanged in 2021.
In a scenario outlined by COES, in its document dated February 2017, called the Medium-term Operation Program of the National Interconnected Electric System (SEIN); it is established that the demand will be: 7,051 MW for 2017; 7,463 MW for 2018 and 7,916 MW for 2019. The lowest growth rate of this series is 5.8% and corresponds to the increase in demand for 2018 compared to 2017. If we use this conservative rate, we would have 8,861 MW in 2021″.
– Engineer César Gutiérrez Peña, ELECTRICIDAD