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Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot | Pumped storage has been around for a while. The state of California runs half a dozen or so of the plants in conjunction with the State Water Project.
There are a number of pumped storage plants being proposed for this area. The topography of this area seems to lend itself to this type of development as we have:
1. Large transmission lines, actually quite a few, already in the area. You have to bring power in and easily be able to get it to the grid, so this is important. North of us along those same transmission lines are the huge windfarms in the Columbia Gorge, and south of us those line feed into California and all those people.
2. Vertical terrain. The more elevation you have between the upper and lower reservoirs the more efficient these pumped storage projects are, but at the same time you don't want a long linear distance. Just going from memory, one of the proposed plants had something like a 1,000' elevation difference between the two reservoirs that were less than a mile apart. The horst and graben topography of the Basin and Range here in the west are perfect for these with steep mountains next to flat valleys.
3. Water. No water is used per se in a pumped storage scheme. The only water lost is to evaporation and seepage. Still, as has always been said in the west... "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting". Finding even a small supply of reliable water might be tough, and we are only on the edge of the desert here. Not only that, any source of water I can think of is, somewhere, going to be subject to the whims of the Endangered Species Act. Hence, water supply is the problem for most of the projects.
Pumped storage is a good tool, but the whole idea of needing to create all of these storage schemes that consume energy is foolish in my mind. First you have to build all these wind farms, then build storage to store the energy when the wind isn't blowing, then build more transmission lines to ferry the energy around, etc. Too many inefficiencies just for the sake of being 'green'. Probably going to cause more harm to the environment in the long run that a couple of good sized nuclear plants, coal, etc sited near the point of use. By far the most economical way to actually produce renewable power is with hydro. It has all of the benefits of the pumped storage plants ‘peaking’ capability, being able to go on and off line quickly, reliable, etc. Not to mention it actually produces power instead of consuming at least 15%. Environmentalist can’t stomach the thought of dams however, so that resource is going unused.
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Storing windmill power
