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The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is in the St. Francois mountain region of the Missouri Ozarks about 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." The Taum Sauk plant was among the largest of its kind when construction began in 1960. It went into operation in 1963 with two reversible pump-turbine units that could each generate of power. In 1999, the plant was upgraded with units capable of apiece. On December 14, 2005, a catastrophic failure in the upper reservoir dam put the plant out of operation until it was rebuilt, recertified, and reopened on April 21, 2010. The new upper reservoir dam, rebuilt from the ground up, is the largest roller-compacted concrete dam in North America. The plant was named an IEEE Milestone in October 2005, just months before the Upper Reservoir failed. ==Size and location== The upper reservoir can hold about 1.5 billion gallons of water (5.7 million m3; behind a wall nearly tall.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Taum Sauk Facts & Figures )〕 It sits above the hydroelectric plant, which gives it a greater head than that of Hoover Dam. The two are connected by a tunnel bored through the mountain. The Taum Sauk upper reservoir sits atop Proffit Mountain, not Taum Sauk Mountain about to the east. It is visible from Route 21 north of Centerville and from Route N approaching Johnson's Shut-ins State Park from the south. Before the failure of the upper reservoir, visitors could drive to the top of Proffit Mountain and walk to an observation deck above the reservoir. Ameren operated a museum at the entrance gate highlighting the geologic and natural history of Missouri. The power plant was frequently visited by geology students because of a striking example of Precambrian/Cambrian unconformity in the rock layers exposed by the plant's construction. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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