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As I posted in the other thread, "Base load" is also utterly the wrong catch phrase for our pollies to have latched on to. Given it was originally a description of the minimum load that the generators wanted to see maintained to avoid having to shut down and fire up big, slow reacting steam turbines.
I am sort of on the fence with pumped hydro. The round trip efficiency surely has to be considerably lower than modern battery storage with multiple stages of energy transfer in both directions (Power to drive motors, to drive pumps, to pump water, then water driving turbines driving generators (Which may or may not be the pumps and motors used in the opposite direction) to produce power, but aside from the environmental effects of building honking big dams to store the water it is at least relatively benign in operation and uses up less environmentally unfriendly materials.
And it is pretty hard to imagine a dam catching fire if a fault develops!
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