The funding award was confirmed in late September after the project was selected through a competitive process in March. It will come via the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), which is providing a total of US$25 billion in funding for a wide range of projects.
The award for the Kentucky PHES project is from the OCED’s Clean Energy Demonstration Program on Current and Former Mine Land, which has a total of US$500 million available.
The 287MW/2,296MWh (8-hour duration) project is in development by Rye subsidiary Lewis Ridge Pumped Storage LLC in Bell County, in Southeastern Kentucky. A project website puts the expected total investment cost of the PHES plant at US$1.3 billion, while the developer claims it will create 1,500 jobs.
The closed-loop design includes two new man-made reservoirs, which Rye Development claimed minimises the project’s impact to existing waterways and to wildlife. The developer aims to have Lewis Ridge Pumped Hydro Storage operational by 2031, after a four-year construction phase which it anticipates beginning in 2027.
Developer: ‘We have identified additional coal mine sites in the US that are suitable for pumped storage’
Rye Development Acquisition was established through a partnership between EDF Inc, a subsidiary of the French state-owned power company, and infrastructure investor Climate Adaptive Infrastructure.
It filed a preliminary permit application in 2021 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and got its preliminary permit in March 2022. Having just submitted its draft license application to the commission, Rye wants to submit a final license application in September 2025 and hopes to get a licensing decision from FERC in Q2 2027.
“We are pleased to partner with the Department of Energy Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the local community to repurpose former coal mine land into a critical new energy storage facility, utilising long-proven technology,” Rye Development CEO Paul Jacob said.
“We have identified additional coal mine sites in the US that are suitable for pumped storage hydropower, where insights gained from the Lewis Ridge facility can support future projects.”
The state of Kentucky, historically dependent on coal for power generation and with coal mining a big piece of its economy, is seeing a slower transition to renewable energy than many other regions of the US.
Two Kentucky utilities, Louisville Gas and Electric (LG&E) and Kentucky Utilities (KU) recently forecast in an integrated resource plan (IRP) that despite forecasted load growth from sources including data centres, they will not deploy any new solar PV until 2035 unless solar becomes more “economically competitive,” as reported by our colleagues at PV Tech.
Race to build first US pumped hydro plant in over three decades
Rye Development’s project could be the first new pumped hydro storage plant built in the US in over 30 years, although it has some competitors in that particular race.
In September, ESN Premium spoke to the CEO of one of those competitors, Luigi Resta, at developer RPlus Energies, which already submitted final license applications for a PHES plant in Nevada and another in Wyoming.
Resta said that RPlus, which also develops wind, solar PV, hybrid renewables-plus-storage and battery energy storage system (BESS) projects, had identified the potential of pumped hydro as a tool for the grid integration of variable renewable energy (VRE) when founding the company six years ago.
“When I started [rPlus Energies], I really saw that there was going to be a significant need for energy storage as a result of all of this intermittent resource coming online, solar and wind over the last 20 years. Batteries, or energy storage, hadn’t really started taking off,” Resta told ESN Premium.
“So, we leaned into the pumped storage hydro world, which is a very proven, robust technology, but which hasn’t been built in 35 years.”
Licensing and permitting for PHES is an expensive and time-consuming business, the CEO said, adding that finding the right strategic location with nearby transmission infrastructure and wind and solar plants at risk of curtailment is essential.
