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Federal subsidies for wind farms have totaled nearly 20 billion dollars in the last decade, according to Utilities have built wind farms due to environmental pressure and the availability of these subsidies.

However, every discussion of either wind or solar generation alternatives is punctuated by the disclaimer that they cannot meet our 24/7 need for power. It can be argued that a major mistake was made with these huge subsidies because they did not require the new wind farms to include storage of excess power generated that could supplement the power grid when the wind doesn鈥檛 blow.

What if no wind generators were subsidized without including storage ability in their plans? Without storage, wind generators are prone to waste power simply because winds blow 24 hours a day, and the peak demand for power is at dawn and dusk when households use the most energy.

Among the options for storage are batteries and pumped water. Today, batteries are generally too expensive to be practical. However, there are at least 43 sites in the United States where excess electricity is used to pump water uphill to be run down through hydroelectric generators when demand is high, according to

These pumped storage systems are recognized as efficient ways to justify the costs of building wind farms. The most cost-effective operations take water from an existing lake and use it to fill a reservoir that, daily, runs the water through turbines that generate electricity as they return the water to the lake.

So, a reservoir is filled from an existing lake, and that water is returned to the lake to provide peaking power to customers. The wind power makes the turbines function as pumps to fill the reservoir and when emptying the reservoir, the same machines become hydroelectric generators for peaking power.

Can pumped storage be built to serve an existing wind farm? It can, but since such storage was not in the location plan for the farm, it probably would be less cost-effective than if it were included originally.

However, wind farms are positioned on the highest ground available, so if a lake were in a nearby valley, that would be an ideal situation. Transmission lines should be as short as possible, so the storage facility should be as close as possible to the wind farm or the path of an existing transmission corridor.

Imagine a large lake with a hydroelectric dam and a large transmission line. Could a utility find a site between the wind farm and the dam where pumped storage could fit in the landscape? Pumped storage would draw water from the existing lake during peak wind power times, and a power line for that pumped storage would feed into the existing power corridor.

With pumped storage, a generation company that uses fossil fuels to back up its wind generation might dial back its fossil fuel releases whenever the wind blows and not have to dial it up as much to meet peak demand periods, minimizing its impact on climate change.

The alternative, without stored power, is for that generation company to find a customer that would use electricity intermittently and sell it to that customer whenever they had a surplus. This would enable them to run their system at the most efficient power level.

The drawback is that this second model would also maximize the release of carbon-based gasses. One such 鈥渋ntermittent鈥� customer could be a crypto-currency operation. In a future edition, I will explain more about the energy impacts of cryptocurrency mining.

To learn more about pumped energy storage, visit the Department of Energy鈥檚 website at This site has some good graphics and a little video to help explain this environmentally friendly method of storing intermittent renewable energy and making it available for peak power needs.

Charlie Parson is a member of the Citizens' Climate Lobby organization. For more information, visit CitizensClimateLobby.org.