Dominion Energy has canceled its plans to build a $2 billion hydroelectric pump storage power station in Tazewell County.
A spokesperson for Virginia’s largest electric utility cited several reasons, including the cost, the expiration of a federal permit and the availability of better and cheaper ways of producing energy.
Spokesperson Jeremy Slayton said the project, for which Dominion first applied for a permit in 2017, didn’t fit with the company’s current strategy. The utility’s latest long-term roadmap for meeting future energy demand includes more solar, nuclear and offshore wind power but not the Tazewell proposal.
“When we modeled everything out, the pump storage facility just didn’t make the cut for that,” Slayton said.
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Slayton called the cancellation a “very recent decision.”
“In the coming months, we will focus on closing out development activities at the site and will collaborate with federal and state authorities, as well as local landowners,” he said.
What is a pump storage facility?
Generally speaking, a pump storage facility has an upper reservoir and lower reservoir to store water, with electricity-generating turbines between them.
Water is released from the upper reservoir and sent through the turbines into the lower reservoir to produce energy during periods of higher demand. It’s pumped back to the upper reservoir during periods of lower demand when the electricity to operate the pumps is cheaper.
Pump storage facilities typically consume more energy than they generate. They can be thought of as similar to giant batteries; their value comes from their ability to produce power during those high-demand periods and to help balance electricity supply and demand.
Dominion already operates the largest such project in the United States: the 3,003-megawatt Bath County Pumped Storage Station, which went into service in 1985.
Virginia has another hydroelectric pump storage facility: the 636-megawatt Smith Mountain Project, which was created when Appalachian Power built the Smith Mountain Dam on the Roanoke River in the 1960s and formed the reservoirs known as Smith Mountain Lake and Leesville Lake.
Since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted its preliminary permit for the Tazewell project in 2017, Dominion has filed nine status reports with that agency. The utility was due to file its next report by the end of this month.
In its most recent report, from November 2023, Dominion said that it was still conducting engineering and environmental study work to evaluate the project’s feasibility.
It also was still looking for a viable source of water to fill the proposed facility’s two reservoirs and was exploring using Wolf Creek near Rocky Gap in Bland County.
Future of East River Mountain site is unclear
Dominion owns 2,600 acres on top of the East River Mountain in Tazewell County that it had planned to use for the pump storage project. The utility will keep that land, Slayton said.
“We’re going to hold on to it. … We have not made any decisions regarding its future use,” he said.
Had the project moved forward, its 10-year development timeline could have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region, creating nearly $320 million in total economic impact and $12 million annually in local tax revenue, Dominion said in 2019, citing a study by Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics.
Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell County, said Thursday that he is disappointed that the pump storage facility will not be built but that he understands the challenges Dominion faced, and “like most large projects, there is always the chance they will not come to fruition.”
“Dominion invested a significant amount of resources to acquire property and perform engineering studies,” Morefield said in a text message. “I am hopeful they will be able to put the property to good use with a project that will create much needed jobs and tax revenue.”