| Bottle the Wind! Copyright by Lynn Mills. All rights reserved Photos on this page are used with the permission of the owners |
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 One of
the Satsop cooling towers
Thanks Kav for permission
to use your pictures!
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The imposing
Satsop towers, looming 480 feet into the air, are clearly
visible, as you look South from highway 12 near the town of
Alma, Washington. Who would imagine seeing sky scrapers, so to speak,
in a scenic and rural setting like this. The graceful shaped
towers rise over fourteen stories above their surroundings dwarfing the
tall Douglas Fir trees growing nearby. Even so you don't fully
appreciate the gargantuan size of these monsters until you stand
beneath them and look up. They truly look as if they are touching the
sky. The towers are the last vestiges of a now defunct consortium that
was planning to build 5 nuclear plants in Washington state.
Only one reactor at Hanford WA was completed. There have been many schemes proposed to help solve our energy problems none of which comes even close to solving our dangerous dependence on foreign and domestic oil production. There is still plenty of energy available to supply our needs for several hundred years but at a very steep price. Future development of coal, natural gas, tar sands and oil shale will be costly. It is becoming more and more apparent that no single approach will be the all inclusive answer to our energy needs. |
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Here is my proposal to help ease the crunch. Solar
and wind power
are both promising sources for future energy needs and they are very
clean and green. Both have problems though. Solar only produces energy
during daylight hours, peaking at noon. At night no power is created.
Conversely wind only generates when the wind is blowing. A major problem facing us today is that up till now there has not been any way to store large amounts of energy for later use except in water reservoirs and that is no longer an option so maybe it is time to build air reservoirs. I would propose the towers at Satsop be retrofitted to turn them into huge storage tanks for air pumped into them by a wind farm. Windmill farms could be used to fill the towers with pressurized air to be stored for use at night and when the wind is not blowing. The pressurized air would be fed into electrical generating turbines to provide power to the grid. When the windmills are not needed to pressurize the towers the windmills would generate electricity and put the energy directly into the power grid. |
 Notice how the tower dwarfs the power poles. Also note the stairs going to the top. |
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 Picture provided courtesy of RoadsideAmerica.com http://www.roadsideamerica.com/ |
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It may be that the towers would not be capable of holding the kind of pressure needed to turn generators. If not then I propose that a correspondingly huge air tank equal to the task be constructed and trials be conducted to determine the feasibility of storing wind/air energy. With this system you put air in and get air and electricity out again. Sounds like a win win situation doesn't it? |