The Columbia River Gorge can be a very windy place, and often when I'm driving through the gorge it will be windy in one section and completely still in another. East of the Dalles, at the far end of the gorge, the hills are dotted with wind turbines on both sides of the river. This particular wind farm is on the Washington side, heading away from the gorge and toward Goldendale. One problem with wind farm energy is that the turbines only produce energy when the wind is blowing, and there is no way to store the energy when there is no wind. I read an article in the paper the other day about a multi-billion dollar project in this area of the gorge that will use the excess wind energy to pump water up a hill to a reservoir at the top, and then when the wind dies down, they can run that water downhill and harness the energy from that. It's called energy integration, and it complements the energy harnessed from the dams along the Columbia (although it only represents a tiny fraction of the energy produced by hydropower along the river.)
