Can Pumped-Storage Hydro be Jump-Started by Thinking Small?

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Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Hearing speakers discuss hydropower, including pumped-storage hydro (PSH), at HYDROVISION INTERNATIONAL 2022, one was reminded of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of the American Dream: a glorious past, an exciting future, but a dreary present.

The dreary present, of course, is the industry's inability to build new hydro or PSH projects, despite rising concern over global climate change and the carbon-free goals of the Biden administration, which seeks to decarbonize the electricity business by 2035, and the U.S. economy by 2050.The last utility-scale PSH project in the U.S. was built in Georgia in the 1990s.

Speakers at this event, held in Denver July 12-14, reeled off a familiar litany of reasons why hydro and PSH should be flourishing, including its dispatchable capacity and non-emitting generation. Whether as a backup for intermittent renewables like wind or solar, or a baseload generation source, hydroelectric generation and PSH would seem to be the answer to many of the world's electricity and climate change challenges. As the world decarbonizes, PSH should be a key that unlocks many doors.

"Hydro is not always part of the renewables conversation, though it should be," Michael Pullinger, president of Energy Resolution Services (Houston, Texas), said July 13.

High capital costs have been, and continue to be, the Achilles heel of PSH, speakers told attendees at the Denver event. Also, in the U.S., utilities have moved away from adding large generators of any type, instead preferring to add smaller incremental units of capacity. The uncertainties of investing $1 billion in a large PSH project is beyond the capacity of even the largest U.S. utilities and merchant developers.

Some attendees quietly fumed about federal agencies, such as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who are charged with administering a welter of federal hydropower regulations. The fuming was quiet because those agencies, plus the Department of Energy, were well represented as speakers and attendees in the breakout sessions.

In the U.S., about 43 PSH projects totaling about 21.9 gigawatts (GW) are operating. PSH accounts for about 93% of all forms of energy storage. There are about 6,732 megawatts (MW) of non-federal PSH under development at sites in Washington state, Wyoming, Idaho and Utah, commented Clark Bishop, a renewable energy program analyst with the Denver office of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He declined to predict whether, or when, these projects would make it to the finish line, though he did say the bureau "is committed to non-federal PSH projects."

One developer hopeful of crossing the finish line soon is Lars Dorr, hydro program manager with rPlus Hydro (Salt Lake City, Utah), whose firm has about 7,550 MW of PSH projects under development. In an interview at the conference, he said the Seminoe project, a 900-MW facility slated to be built in Wyoming, may win its required permits by the end of 2022. If so, construction could begin in 2026, and the project could be operating by 2031. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Power Project Database can click here for the detailed project report.

"PSH has a great future," Dorr said. "I'm really excited about its potential. Utility interest in PSH has been growing markedly in the last two years," though he declined to name names.

The 400-MW Swan Lake project in Oregon could begin construction by the end of 2024, another conference attendee said in an interview. Subscribers can click here for the report.

While hydro and PSH have traditionally been built on scale, one conference speaker urged developers to think smaller. Adam Rousselle, Sr., president of Renewable Energy Aggregators (Tampa, Florida), said there were 130,000 abandoned mining quarries across North America that were located alongside highways and were within four miles of a highway truck stop. The average depth of these quarries is about 350 feet, with some exceeding 600 feet, he said July 13.

To fuel the clean energy future, highway truck stops will have average electric demand of 200 MW, in order for long-haul EV truckers and automobile drivers to recharge their batteries. There are more than 4,000 highway truck stops in North America that currently sell diesel fuel to long-haul truckers, he estimated. Over time, diesel will give way to electrified transportation, he said.

Rousselle said his company, which has been contacted by the White House, is trying to build an American Hydropower Highway by constructing PSH projects in abandoned mining quarries and contracting for the power with truck stop chains. He said he's focusing first on states that have restructured their electricity industry, as it's easier there to sign contracts directly with customers, without having to involve local utilities.

The federal government is in the process of distributing funding to build a national EV charging network, Rousselle reminded HYDROVISION INTERNATIONAL attendees.

"Go directly to your customers--the truck-stop industry--and ignore the noise around the electric grid, federal agencies, RTO queues and the like. We're building the chicken--the eggs will come."

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