Energy firm Rye Development has started construction of a $1 billion pumped hydropower storage project in order to speed up energy transition in the US state of Kentucky.
The Lewis Ridge pumped storage project will be sited in Cumberland River near an active coal mining area with the aim to ensure energy security, sustainability, and employment creation as coal phase-out intensifies across the US.
Rye Development is awaiting approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to operate the project over a period of 50 years. However, construction has already started and is expected to create 2,000 jobs over a period of three to five years.
Once approved for operation, the storage project will generate over 200 MW of clean capacity for 8 hours. The site of the project is close to existing transmission and distribution infrastructure, making it easy for energy to be directed to the consumers, boosting reliability without the need for additional investments in transportation infrastructure, according to the statement.
Paul Jacob, CEO of Rye, said: “The Lewis Ridge project marks a significant step forward in the push toward a more renewable energy grid.”
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Jacob added that pumped hydropower, long-duration energy storage will help simplify the energy transition and enable an increasing amount of renewable from solar and wind to be integrated into the grid.
He said long-duration storage such as pumped hydropower will enable utilities to address renewables fluctuation, the main barrier to the use of clean capacity to provide baseload power.
The Lewis Ridge project is a closed-loop pumped-storage facility. These are systems that move water between a man-made lower reservoir and a man-made upper reservoir. Water is released from the upper reservoir and used to turn hydroelectric turbines to generate electricity before being collected in the lower reservoir and then returned to the upper reservoir to repeat the process, recycling the same water thousands of times to deploy needed energy to the grid.
Pumped storage offers a flexible solution to the changing grid, including the ability to store intermittent solar and wind resources moving forward.
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Pumped storage facilities are the most common form of energy storage in the US, representing 95% of all utility-scale storage, according to the US Department of Energy.
