When a Florida company recently proposed building two small dams in Wise County for hydropower projects, the announcement may have caught some by surprise.
We haven’t seen hydropower built in Virginia in nearly half a century — when Dominion Energy started construction on its Bath County pumped storage project in 1977.
However, the two projects proposed by Rye Development are part of a renaissance of small hydropower projects nationwide, driven by growing demands for power — in particular, power that’s not based on fossil fuels.
Construction of new hydropower dams in the United States basically ceased in the 1990s when the last wave of big dams that started construction in the 1970s finally came online. (The Dominion project was completed in 1985. Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy). Since then, the nation has seen more dams removed than built, and those being built were largely for retrofitting purposes, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Now that’s changing. There are currently 70 proposed pumped storage hydropower projects across the United States, according to figures compiled by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (plus another 100 or so proposed regular hydropower projects). None have been built yet, but five of those pumped storage projects have already been issued licenses while another four have licenses pending.
What’s different is that these are much smaller projects than the gargantuan projects of the past (Dominion’s Bath County facility was the largest pumped storage operation in the world until it was surpassed by one in China two years ago). Most of them are also out west, where the topography makes hydropower easier to construct — and California demands more green power for its electric grid. However, we are now seeing some projects pop up in the East, mostly along the Appalachians. In Virginia, this interest in pumped storage is partly driven by a new law that specifically requires some long-duration energy storage be located “in the coalfield region” of Southwest Virginia. While that law doesn’t require that storage be hydro projects, for now pumped storage hydro may be the only way to meet those new legal requirements.
That’s the context in which we should view the two proposed projects in Wise County. Here are some other things to know — not to advocate for or against these projects, but to better understand the environment in which these proposals have come forward.
Pumped storage hydropower is different from regular hydropower
A definition before we go further: Conventional hydropower — run-of-the-river hydropower — relies on water flowing over a dam to generate power. That’s how Appalachian Power’s Claytor Lake in Pulaski County and Niagara Dam in Roanoke County work. Pumped storage involves two separate reservoirs. When power is needed, water is released from the upper reservoir into the lower reservoir to turn the turbines. When the power isn’t needed, that water is pumped back up to the upper reservoir. Overall, pumped storage generally consumes more power than it produces, but the key thing is that it can produce that power on demand, when it’s needed. That’s how Appalachian’s Smith Mountain Lake works (in conjunction with Leesville Lake downstream) and how Dominion’s Bath County project works. And that’s how these two proposed projects in Wise County would work.
Pumped storage hydropower is considered energy storage
The push for more renewable energy comes with a big catch: Solar power and wind power aren’t always available. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. In Virginia (and across the multi-state PJM grid that it’s part of), solar far outweighs wind as a factor, but solar peaks in late morning and then drops to nothing once the sun goes down. The solution to that is battery storage, which is exactly what it sounds like — big batteries that soak up energy when there’s a surplus of power and then release it onto the grid when it’s not. Right now, we don’t have much battery storage (the website Grid Status generally puts storage at no more than 0.1% of the energy on the PJM grid even at its high point) and proposals for battery storage seem destined to become as controversial as solar projects are. Culpeper County, for instance, recently banned battery storage from agricultural land, despite protests from farmers who said they could use the extra income to be had from leasing land for storage facilities.
Pumped storage projects are often called giant batteries because they constitute a different type of energy storage. “They’re energy storage just not chemical batteries,” says Del. Richard “Rip” Sullivan, D-Fairfax County, who sponsored legislation this year that creates new incentives for energy storage in Virginia.
More importantly, pumped storage is considered “long duration storage” because pumped storage projects can produce power over a longer period of time than lithium-ion battery storage now can. Most utility-scale lithium-ion batteries can only store power for a few hours. In June, a site opened in California that Canary Media, which covers the renewable energy industry, says “became the first major battery installation in the U.S. that can discharge power for up to eight hours at a time — twice as long as typical energy-storage facilities.” By contrast, pumped storage projects generally run from eight hours to as much as 20-plus hours.
The website Grid Status shows hydropower from pumped storage starts flowing onto the grid most days in mid-afternoon and continues well into the night, meaning it’s producing power when a) energy demand typically peaks and b) solar and wind are at their lowest points. If we want more renewable energy, then we need to develop more energy storage along with it. Alida Cantor, a geography professor at Portland State University in Oregon who has studied pumped storage projects, says that demand for energy storage is what’s now driving the new interest in hydropower. “As a technology, it’s pretty low-tech,” she says. “It has good potential to fill that gap for energy storage that the transition to renewables brings up … It really is an important part of the puzzle that can reduce the reliance on fossil fuels if you can bridge that nighttime gap.”
Pumped storage is considered “dispatchable”
One frequent criticism of renewable energy is that the grid needs power that is “dispatchable” — meaning you can turn it on and dispatch it when you need it. Solar and wind aren’t considered dispatchable because we ultimately can’t control when the sun shines or the wind blows. Hydropower is the rare non-carbon energy source (nuclear is another) that is dispatchable. You can turn it on and off as needed, although the start-up time for pumped storage is measured in minutes while nuclear generally runs at a consistent rate. Because of the quick on-and-off, pumped storage “has an important role to play in stabilizing grids and allowing a shift to renewables,” Cantor says. In other words, pumped storage hydro can quickly be turned on to balance out the grid when solar and wind power drops.
“Solar is cheap but is variable and can create issues if that’s your primary energy source,” says Scott DeNeale, a Water Resources Engineer for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “so having a back up to balance out” the grid is wise.
“The market is changing,” says Connor Nelson, senior manager of regulatory affairs and markets for the National Hydropower Association. “We really see a need for long duration energy storage,” and hydro projects are trying to fill some of that demand.
Virginia law now mandates 20% of new long-duration storage be in coal country
Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed, a new law that increases the amount of energy storage that Appalachian Power and Dominion Power must request permission from state regulators to add to their portfolios. By 2045, Appalachian must petition for approval to add 780 megawatts of short-duration energy storage and 520 megawatts of long-duration energy storage. Dominion, the larger of the two utilities, must petition for approval to add 16,000 megawatts of short-duration storage and 4,000 megawatts of long-duration storage. For each utility, the law says that half the new long-duration storage can be 10-24 hours while the other half must be more than 24 hours. That doesn’t explicitly say pumped storage, but, for now, that’s the only technology that seems to fit.
Furthermore, that new law specifically requires Dominion to locate “at least 20 percent” of its long-duration storage “in the coalfield region of the Commonwealth,” which essentially works as a mandate for pumped storage in the region. Sullivan, the bill’s sponsor, said he added that requirement at the behest of House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, as a way to boost job growth in Southwest Virginia. “It would be good for economic development and generation capacity moving forward,” Kilgore says. While no deals have been struck, the law creates an incentive for Dominion to buy energy from the Rye sites, if they are built.
Private developers are at the forefront of pumped storage renaissance
Most of us grew up in a world where utilities were the only ones building power sources. That’s changed. With solar and wind, we see lots of other companies building generation sites and then selling the power to utilities. Dominion is developing an offshore wind site off the coast of Virginia Beach, but Apex Energy of Charlottesville is building the state’s first onshore wind farm in Botetourt County. Most solar sites are typically built by private developers.
How to comment
The deadline to file public comments on the Bluff Spur application is 5 p.m. Aug. 17. FERC encourages submitting comments online.
Comments also can be mailed to Debbie-Anne A. Reese, Secretary, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, 888 First Street N.E., Room 1A, Washington, D.C. 20426.
Application details can be found here using docket number P-15425.
That’s what’s happening with pumped storage, too. About 85% of the pumped storage projects now being proposed are from private developers, DeNeale says. Of those, Rye Development is one of the best-known, with more than a dozen hydropower projects in the pipeline across the country, including two pumped-storage projects in the Pacific Northwest that it obtained licenses for but are not yet under construction.
“I’m familiar with Rye,” Sullivan says. “They’ve been in my office. One of the things I’m expecting to see — glad to see — is that Virginia has said we want to do more energy storage and the industry is showing up.” Sullivan says he’s not aware of other hydro developers interested in Virginia but would not be surprised to see others; he also points out that some pumped storage technologies don’t require water at all; they make use of compressed carbon dioxide underground.
For those curious, neither Rye Development nor its top executives show up as donors to any political campaigns in Virginia, according to a search of the Virginia Public Access Project database.
There’s long been an interest in redeveloping old coal mines
Both proposed sites in Wise County are on former coal mines. These projects would appear to fit the requirement for reclamation of old mines. Redevelopment of old mine sites has been a goal under both parties; the Joe Biden administration, in particular, was interested in using old mine sites as places to develop renewable energy as a way to bring job growth to a part of the country that has lost jobs in the transition away from fossil fuels. Under the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021, Biden directed $475 million to clean energy projects on mine lands. While these two projects aren’t government-funded, they do fit under the general idea that mine sites could be converted into renewable energy sites.
Pumped storage projects are measured in years
One reason we’re seeing so much solar development across Virginia is that solar is relatively quick to build. Pumped storage is not. “Obtaining a [federal] license, for any new project, typically takes a minimum of 5 years and could take much longer depending on environmental issues and regulatory authorities involved,” according to the National Hydropower Association.
These projects, if they happen, will not happen quickly. However, this is the context in which they have been made.
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