Our anti-environment administration; renewing hydropower with pumped storage

The figure at left summarizes the various sources of greenhouse gases for the US.  Notice that electricity is a substantial contributor.  The reason, of course, is that about 63 percent of electricity generation is produced from plants employing fossil fuels, which upon combustion, convert to carbon dioxide.  Most of us have every reason to wish this dependence on carbon were much smaller.  Solar and wind power have come increasingly into the mix, and we can expect those contributions to increase rapidly in the years ahead.  But so much potential progress is being blocked by appointees in the Trump administration. Rick Perry’s time as the head of the Department of Energy is severely hamstringing the country’s economic development and energy security.  The detestable Scott Pruitt has finally been kicked out at EPA, but Trump has replaced him with Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who worked for Murray Energy, the nation's largest coal producer.  Its CEO, Robert  E. Murray,  has been  an avid backer of Donald Trump.   Then there’s the appointment of  Daniel Simmons, a conservative scholar and renewable energy critic to be the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).  EERE’s mission is to create and sustain American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy.  It’s difficult to imagine a less appropriate person to pursue this important mission. Simmons recently served as vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a notoriously conservative think tank, supported primarily by fossil fuel money.  It advocates greater fossil fuel use and opposes the international climate agreement signed in Paris. If Simmons’s views on renewable energy, and his mindless favoring of fossil fuel over renewable energy enterprises in the US budget and environmental policies, find their way into practice, it would be a shameful betrayal of the public trust.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this blog about hydropower. In retrospect, I think I may have been more skeptical of its promise than I need have been.  Since that blog appeared, the New York Times published a beautiful interactive article on a $3 billion plan to combine the virtues of renewable but variable solar energy with the stored energy capacity of hydroelectric power. This is long-range, and years from completion, but the story is instructive and a pleasure to read and watch. In brief, the idea is that during the daylight hours a pumping station downstream from Hoover Dam would pump water that has already run through the hydroelectric station back upstream to Lake Mead.  The pumping station would be powered by a gigantic solar farm. The solar energy would in effect be stored by raising the water back up to the lake level so that it can be utilized again for electric power generation. While the solar farm is inactive, during nighttime, the energy it collected from the sun would be recovered in the dam.

This is not a new idea.  Pumped storage, as it is called, is already practiced at about 40 locations.  But this would be larger than any currently in operation.  It needs to be said that pumped storage is not going to be a huge factor in the nation’s energy budget, but, every bit helps. That philosophy is inherent in Project Drawdown, an imaginative approach to mitigating the increase in greenhouse gas levels via many different actions, some potentially very large, such as reforestation, regenerative agriculture, reduced reliance on animal protein and education of women and girls in developing nations.  

I must say that writing about pumped storage and Project Drawdown makes me feel refreshed after having to write about the visionless, narrow-minded and ultimately selfish machinations of our current executive leadership in Washington.  I only hope they don’t succeed in doing irreparable damage before the American people wake up.

         I urge you to have a look at the Drawdown site.  Watch Paul Hawken's interviews--he's inspiring.