Sustainable electrical energy supply with wind and pumped storage - a realistic long-term strategy or utopia?

Sustainability of the future energy supply based on renewable resources is a long-term strategic objective in view of limited fossil resources and avoidance of emissions and toxic waste. Of the various resources, available now or in future, wind is presently considered in Europe to hold most promise in the next few decades for contributing a sizable part of the electrical energy; generating electricity from wind is state of the art and feeding large amounts of wind power to the electrical grid is believed by many to be unproblematic. With recent data from one of the four control areas in Germany it is discussed how a sustainable energy supply based on off-shore wind power and pumped storage, called a "wind and water"-model, might look. It turns out that such an energy scheme, while feasible in principle, would require an immense storage capacity which would be impossible to realize. Thermal generation continues to be needed, based on various energy carriers, among them biomass according to availability