Hydropower
Paul Kjellander is PUF Senior Advisor and former Idaho PUC Chair.
The days of damming rivers to build large-scale hydropower facilities in the United States are likely well behind us. Environment, recreation, and other doses of reality push any thought of new utility-scale hydropower development off the table.
Even with the need to find new baseload, dispatchable, emission-free resources to address the energy transition, traditional large-scale hydro projects are unlikely to receive serious consideration. But that doesn’t mean there is no future role for hydropower.
In fact, there has been recent consideration of the idea of developing pumped storage hydropower projects. Pumped storage hydropower is not a new concept. This resource has been deployed in the U.S. and globally since the early 1900s.
The basic concept requires two water reservoirs at different elevations that pump water from a lower reservoir to be stored at the higher reservoir. When power is needed, the water from the higher reservoir is released, passes through a turbine to produce energy, and the water is then collected in the lower reservoir where the process is repeated.