Randy Knowles figures he’s moving in the right direction. “They used to call me crazy,” he said with a self-effacing chuckle. “Now they’re calling me audacious.”

For well over a decade, the Klickitat (Washington) Public Utility District commissioner has promoted building a big pumped storage project off-stream from the Columbia River at the John Day Dam, 110 miles upriver from Portland, Oregon. Now, after years of holding a preliminary permit to study the possibility, the district is moving to obtain a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [PDF].

The idea, officially dubbed the JD Pool Pumped Storage Project, long earned Knowles sideways glances for a variety of reasons. How on earth was the small, rural Klickitat PUD, which serves around 11,000 customers with an average load of not even 50 megawatts, going to pull off a 1,200 MW project? Who would foot the $2 billion-plus bill? And hadn’t anybody told Knowles that pumped storage was dead in the U.S.?

But Knowles and Klickitat have persisted, and the energy terrain might be shifting in their favor. Plus, there’s one thing they know for sure: They have a site that’s picture-perfect for pumped storage.

“If this pumped storage project can’t get built, then none can,” Knowles said on a recent visit to the site.

Pumped storage is a century-old technology based on a simple concept: When power is abundant, use it to pump water uphill; when power is scarce, release the water downhill, turning turbines to generate electricity. From the 1950s into the 1980s, pumped storage systems, like Ludington Pumped Storage in Michigan, were built as companions to many large baseload power plants in the U.S., helping utilities capture the full value of a high, steady stream of output even as demand ebbed and flowed from day to night and on weekends. Forty pumped storage plants now provide around 22 gigawatts of storage capacity in the U.S., according to the Energy Information Administration – but a big new system hasn’t gone into service in 20 years.

A variety of factors conspired against pumped storage projects, which were always long and expensive affairs to begin with. New nuclear and coal-fired plants became scarce, diminishing the need. Then, as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put it in a recent presentation, the evolving, at least partially deregulated electricity market left projects – a hybrid of transmission, generation and distribution – “unable to capture the benefit they provide to other power system users.”

The Renewables Challenge

But against this bleak backdrop, the past decade has also brought a rising tide of wind and solar. The degree to which these intermittent energy sources present grid integration challenges can be overstated, but signs of trouble have popped up. There’s little question that higher levels of renewable-energy penetration will force the need for greater grid flexibility as the task of matching supply and demand – every second, every minute, every hour, every day – grows more complex.

In the Northwest, where nearly 6,000 MW of wind power came online between 2000 and 20011, the Bonneville Power Authority sometimes struggles to crank down hydroelectric generation to make room for wind power. In California, the state’s main grid operator frets about a developing “Duck Curve” to its daily load [PDF]. That fowl shape reflects increasing amounts of solar power eventually creating steep power ramps, down in the morning and up in the evening, around an early-afternoon period of over-generation. It’s no way to operate a grid reliably or efficiently.

A variety of remedies are talked about. Efficiency and demand response programs could help. Natural gas peaking plants are enticing, but today’s cheap gas is no sure thing forever, plant idleness reduces investment efficiency and climate gains are hardly a sure thing.

So, hey, how about pumped storage?

“We have needs here in the Northwest, and there’s no question California is becoming interested,” Knowles said. “People are becoming receptive to the message that pumped storage can play a big, varied role.”

A Wide Range of Services

In its federal filing, Klickitat said JD Pool “would provide additional ramping capacity (both up and down) as well as firming for wind energy regulation, coordination and scheduling of services, automatic generation control, and support of system integrity and security (reactive power, spinning and operating reserves).”

A new sense of urgency regarding storage was reflected in the decision by California regulators in October 2013 to require investor-owned utilities to line up 1,325 megawatts of new energy storage by 2020. The state excluded pumped storage from the array of options, saying it wanted to inspire advances in new technologies, like innovative batteries.

Nevertheless, California has its own pumped storage projects in the planning stages, most prominently the Eagle Crest Energy Company’s Eagle Mountain project near Joshua Tree National Park (a project that horrifies environmentalists and locals) and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s Iron Hill project in the Sierra Nevada.

Folks in Klickitat think they can compete with those projects, and a handful of others in the West that are getting serious attention.

In a report for the utility PacifiCorp that looked at various pumped storage sites, HDR Engineering sang the JD Pool’s virtues: “It is in the middle of BPA’s robust high voltage transmission corridor, it can be developed in an environmentally benign manner, and the associated topography supports a high energy density design.”

This collection of factors is readily apparent in visiting the site. The lower reservoir, with a surface area around 100 acres and holding around 12,000 acre-feet of water, would sit nicely alongside the Columbia River on the grounds of a shuttered aluminum smelter. Established water rights provide many times more water than would be needed to periodically recharge the closed-looped system, and Washington State law specifically allows use of river water for pumped storage. Grid interconnection is in view.

Then there’s the stunning, sheer rise up to the two upper reservoir sites – more than 2,000 feet vertical in just a bit over one mile horizontal. This short length-to-head ratio gives JD Pool the “high energy density” the HDR analysts talked about. In addition to cranking out 1,200 MW of power, the system would be able to store up to 17,000 megawatt-hours of energy.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in an initial federal filing regarding the project, did warn of possible issues with migratory birds. And the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation raised objections, saying the project “would cause detrimental impacts to significant cultural resources near the John Day Dam and the Columbia Hills.” But the history of aluminum smelting alongside the dam and the giant wind turbines that crowd the hills suggest an already-industrialized site. As Brian Skeahan, the project coordinator brought on by the Klickitat PUD, put it, “This is hardly a greenfield site by any stretch of the imagination.”

But Who Will Pay?

Skeahan said the biggest challenge Klickitat will face is the one every pumped storage project faces: how to value the benefits the project can provide and draw in participants and investors.

What might it be worth to a California utility – say, Pacific Gas & Electric – to be able to send power north when the load curve is at the duck’s back, or draw power when it moves up to the duck’s head? What might it be worth to coal-reliant PacifiCorp to gain the ability to bring permitted but unbuilt Northwest wind power online if the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan moves forward? Or to Portland General Electric, when the Boardman Coal Plant shuts down in 2020? What might it be worth to the Federal Columbia River Power System to have a big new tool – one it could use with no adverse environmental impact – for renewable integration and operational flexibility? What might it be worth to Oregon and Washington, whose governors hope to pursue ambitious climate goals?

President Obama’s first Energy secretary, Steven Chu, raised the profile of pumped storage in his early days running the department. Now, emerging work from the DOE’s Argonne National Lab points to a high value for new and enhanced pumped storage. From an August 2014 lab report [PDF]:

We conclude that providing further support for the development of new PSH (pumped storage hydroelectric) units and AS (adjustable speed) upgrades to existing PSH units will contribute to grid reliability and will facilitate a larger expansion of variable renewable energy, thereby reducing power system emissions in the United States.

The report went on to offer recommendations for making it happen:

Further developments of PSH can be encouraged through streamlined licensing, as proposed by (the Hydropower Regulatory Efficiency Act) of 2013 for closed-loop projects. Moreover, key activities that can help accelerate PSH developments in the United States include (1) the development of tools to allow owners/operators of pumped storage hydropower plants to evaluate the feasibility of conversion from fixed-speed to adjustable-speed technologies; and (2) investigate market mechanisms that would accurately compensate pumped storage hydropower for the full range of valuable services provided to the power grid.

This gathering recognition of pumped storage’s value and necessity feeds hope in Klickitat that a way will be found and that come, say, 2024, the project will be up and running. What’s in it for Klickitat? The motivation is partly economic – the project would double Klickitat County’s tax base, Knowles said, and could spur more lucrative wind power development. But quaint as it sounds, Knowles seems every bit as driven by the opportunity to do good. Back in the 1990s, this same impulse spurred Klickitat to get out front in pursuit of landfill gas, and in the 2000s to invest in wind power development.

“The pumped storage project is a lot bigger, no doubt about it,” Knowles said. “It can seem impossible and expensive and whatever people want to say. But the benefits will flow to generations to come. It’s the kind of thing we used to do a lot in this country, and I’d like to think we still can.”

July 15, 2015, update: Looks like the JD Pool Pumped Hydro project will have to wait even longer if it’s ever going to happen. We’ve learned that the Klickitat Public Utility District Board of Commissioners has decided to suspend Federal Energy Regulatory Commission licensing efforts on the project. Two issues were cited in a press release emailed to BreakingEnergy.com:

“One was time. With the very compressed licensing schedule the Board begn to have concerns regarding our ability to complete the many required studies, allow interested parties a reasonable amount of time to respond to the study results, and still have enough time to incorporate those responses into a license application that would be accepted by FERC as complete.

“The second issue was financial. The Board has from the out-set of the licensing process maintained that we would not ultimately licence and then build a project of this size by ourselves. We have sought a party or parties to assist in the licensing and construction effort. To date we have been unsuccessful in that effort.”