enjoy tour

The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is located in the St. Francois mountain region of the Missouri Ozarks approximately 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri in Reynolds County. The pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, operated by the AmerenUE electric company, was designed to help meet peak power demands during the day. Electrical generators are turned by water flowing from a reservoir on top of Proffit Mountain into a lower reservoir on the East Fork of the Black River. The generators and turbines at river level are reversible, and at night the excess electricity available on the power grid is used to pump water back to the mountaintop. The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is in the St. Francois mountain region of the Missouri Ozarks about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County. It is operated by the AmerenUE electric company. The pumped-storage hydroelectric plant was built to help meet peak power demands during the day. Electrical generators are turned by water flowing from a reservoir on top of Proffit Mountain into a lower reservoir on the East Fork of the Black River. At night, excess electricity on the power grid is used to pump water back to the mountaintop. The Taum Sauk plant is a pure pump-back operation: unlike most other pumped storage sites, there is no natural primary flow available for generation. It is therefore a net consumer of electricity; the laws of thermodynamics dictate that more power is used to pump the water up the mountain than is generated when it comes down. However, the plant is still economical to operate because the upper reservoir is refilled at night, when the electrical generation system is running at low-cost baseline capacity. This ability to store energy led its operator to call Taum Sauk "the biggest battery that we have. READ MORE...forum.xcitefun.net