[Big Dave]

Back to the original post.

The thing that kills pumped storage in the West in general (anyplace west of the Hundredth Meridian) is water.

In the west water is life. In western NE, you can buy land for $10/acre but it is worthless without the water rights. Water in the west is far too vital to use for pumping back and forth between dams.

If the US were to want to make use of pumped storage the best area is in the central Appalachians. Roughly from the NC-SC line north to the St.Lawrence River, bounded on the east by the Appalachian divide and on the west by more or less 75 miles depending on the terrain.

There are a bunch of mountain valleys in that are that are nearly uninhabited (and becoming moreso as time goes on) that could be dammed up with a pair of dams and a powerhouse and connected to the grid for bringing in/out vast amounts of energy. Evaporation is not an issue. The area is borderline rain forest -50-80 inches of rain a year. That much rain will give all the dams a natural hydro boost.

There are already two big pumped storage dams there that I know of. Smith Mountain Lake on the VA/NC line and Bath County VA.

Grasp the scale. I'm talking flooding 25-40 mountain valleys in western NC, eastern TN, western VA, eastern KY, central WV, western/central PA, and western NY. Maybe spare the valleys needed for transportation like the Potomac Valley and the New River (major railroads) will be spared.

You could put wind turbines on the Appalachian Divide. You'd have to squash a few hundred thousand NIMBYs, but you're gonna have to relocate them anyway. Hopefully somebody can come up with a wind turbine that cn pay for its own maintenance. Solar? Forget about it. Like I said, the area is a rain forest. Cloudy most of the time. There is still lots of gas and coal in the region and they run hooked to the dams and the dmas provide electricity to the East Coast and Midwest.