You don’t need a lake, just a hill or a hole. And the only places without a vast excess of pumped hydro resources have amazing solar and wind resource so don’t need it.

A renewable system with PHES for storage is both viable pretty much everywhere, and significantly cheaper than thermal generation. They likely won’t get built because it’s not really competitive vs batteries for short duration storage, takes a lot of time/coordination, and storage requirements are about an order of magnitude less than the fossil fuel shills are claiming.