It might just not be practical to use some of the wind capacity that we have.  In order to have enough power when we need it we might need to overbuild for times when we don’t. 

Or perhaps we need some very large CAES storage – fill up a few enormous caverns with seasonal wind that we could call on during peak-peak heat waves.  Wouldn’t cost anything to leave that compressed air sitting there.  Especially if we used the turbines for dispatchable backup in the meantime.

Another is to use an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) so the heat source for power generation can be low temperature.  The working fluid is a high molecular weight refrigerant, instead of water.

The worst waste of energy I know of is the heat rejection at thermal power plants.  Only about a third of the energy in coal becomes power, and the rest is rejected to the atmosphere through the cooling towers, along with a lot of fresh water.  Power plants consume more fresh water than any other activity, next to agriculture.  The turbine exhaust steam at power plants could be a resource for waste heat power harvesting with a little intelligent design.  Making that steam lose enthalpy doing useful work makes more sense than cooling by evaporating precious fresh water uselessly into the atmosphere. 

And let’s not forget about the waste of 25TWh of curtailed wind last year.  Put that wind to work doing something useful, like grinding or pumping.  Wind’s highest and best use might well turn out to be something other than power generation. 

A logical solution to the problem of the former is to use it to overcome the problem of the latter.

http://futureenergyinvesting.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54edb740688330134876583d9970c-pi