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Rye Development secured a federal license to build a massive new pumped hydro energy storage facility in Washington state. The company could become the first to construct this type of grid megaproject in the U.S. since 1995.
Long before lithium-ion batteries reshaped the power sector, utilities stored electricity by pumping water uphill when energy was abundant and later letting it descend, turning turbines to generate power when needed. This technique depends on gravity and heavy construction, and the U.S. pumped hydro fleet got built when utilities could unilaterally invest in long-term assets. In the country’s modern, largely deregulated, and rapidly changing power markets, nobody has pulled off the expensive and time-consuming feat.
Until now — potentially. On Thursday, Rye secured a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build and operate a planned pumped storage project just north of the Columbia River Gorge, near the town of Goldendale (population 3,500). It’s the final regulatory step, meaning that Rye can now finalize plans and begin building.
“With electricity demand and energy costs on the rise, this type of pumped storage project represents a huge step forward,” said Erik Steimle, director of development at Rye. He added, “It’s a fully domestic source of energy storage: The major components are concrete, steel, and labor.”
That effort joins two others Rye is working on, which Steimle said could start construction sooner: Swan Lake in Oregon and Lewis Ridge in Kentucky. So far, though, none have broken ground.
At Goldendale, Rye plans to excavate two 60-acre reservoirs separated by 2,000 feet of vertical gain. The company will pipe in water from the nearby Columbia River, then circulate the water up and down to store and discharge power.
This will have a nameplate capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, bigger than any battery storage installation thus far. But pumped storage really shines in how long it can discharge power for — in this case, 12 hours. The cost of building a bigger reservoir scales much more favorably than stacking more batteries does to achieve the extended storage.
The project is a bet on increased demand for long-duration storage as intermittent renewable production surges. The Pacific Northwest has built ample solar and wind generation but has struggled to expand its transmission network, which produces congestion on the wires. So a major storage plant like Goldendale could help: charging up when solar or wind floods the network and then discharging back when demand is high.
The project will typically pump water for 12 to 16 hours a day and generate eight hours a day, but it could push that to a maximum of 12 hours, according to the license document.
Individual power plants seldom need to petition FERC for permission, but Goldendale fell under that body’s jurisdiction because it will connect with federal land and pump water from a navigable waterway. Notably, the new reservoirs will not even touch the Columbia, drastically limiting environmental impacts, compared with those from America’s earlier dam-building spree.
The layout covers about 680 acres, largely private land that used to house a decommissioned aluminum smelter, but it connects to transmission infrastructure overseen by the federal Bonneville Power Administration. Up on a ridge, the high reservoir will be nestled among a series of wind turbines. Between that power plant and the smelter, Rye won’t need to build any new access roads, Steimle said.
The approval stipulates certain environmental mitigations: Rye has to schedule its filling of the reservoirs to avoid altering the river flow during salmon smolt migration, for instance; plant native vegetation on disturbed land; and purchase 277 acres elsewhere to dedicate to golden eagles’ nesting and foraging.
With federal permission secured, Rye now needs to lock down customer contracts (much like another capital-intensive long-duration storage project, Hydrostor’s recently approved compressed-air effort in California). This type of infrastructure is too costly to build without a guarantee of revenue. But Rye needed to win its license before it could finalize contracts with customers, Steimle noted. The project can serve utilities in the Pacific Northwest as well as in California, where state regulators have mandated that power providers buy long-duration storage to balance a massive supply of solar generation.
Rye has already secured a financing partner for Goldendale: Danish firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which also bought Rye’s Swan Lake project, back in 2020. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners will supply the estimated $2 billion to $3 billion needed to build Goldendale once Rye finds buyers for the clean power.
Now, Rye will finalize construction planning alongside its commercial efforts. The FERC license stipulates that construction must commence within 24 months, so the countdown is on.
Even Rye’s successful licensing journey underscores the challenges of leaning on pumped hydro to support the transition to clean energy. The company filed for its license in June 2020. It took five and a half years to get the green light, and it will take up to two years to finalize plans and then four or five more to actually finish building the thing.
That ponderous pace explains why such a large-scale plant hasn’t been built in the U.S. since the Rocky Mountain Hydroelectric Plant came online in Georgia in 1995. A few other companies have tried, like Absaroka Energy, which is developing the Gordon Butte plant in Montana. Globally, a new pumped hydro site opened in Switzerland in 2022; it took just 14 years.
To put it simply, pumped hydro construction isn’t a nimble response to a rapidly changing electricity mix. Batteries, on the other hand, are — they’re mass-produced in factories and can be installed swiftly in prepackaged containers.
But pumped hydro works extremely well when built. It has a far longer duration than the typical four-hour lithium-ion battery. These facilities also last far longer than lithium-ion cells, which degrade with use. The Goldendale license covers 40 years of operation, but the system is designed to last 100, Steimle said; the owner of the Rocky Mountain plant sought a license extension for another 40 to 50 years.
“Pumped hydro is a battery you can cycle over and over again with little to no degradation over a very long period of time,” he said.
And it clearly works at a massive scale: The U.S. has more than 22 gigawatts already running.
As Paul Denholm, a clean grid modeler at the institution formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Canary Media previously, “Utilities with pumped-storage plants love them — they’re awesome.”
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