Thought Solar Was Hard to Permit? Try Pumped Storage!

[Fledermaus]

One company that has successfully stayed more or less in business throughout the permitting process for traditional pumped hydro storage is Symbiotics, which is based in Utah. They received preliminary permits from FERC for two Utah pumped-hydro projects, one that has a capacity of 700 MW in Rich County, due online in 2020, and another, in Piutte County, Utah, with a capacity of about 1,330 MW, due online in 2017.

During this long drawn out process, Symbiotics was bought out by a new kind of hydro-power startup, Riverbank Power, which acquired Symbiotics in a merger a few months ago. Riverbank Power is the highly innovative company we wrote about last year that uses gravity under rivers to store hydro power: Pump Hydro Underground to Store Wind Power.

Vince Lamarra, founder and former CEO of Symbiotics, and now vice president of project development at Riverbank Power, is sanguine about the time it takes to get permitted and built; about a decade.

"In a best-case scenario, you might be able to get a federal license in five years, but then it takes another two years for the engineering and then three more years to build a pumped-storage project, and they cost about $1.5 billion to $2 billion to build, because they are very large facilities," he said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/20/idUS203532216620110420

[ixion]

1. 5 years to get the permit... but how long did it take BP to get their permit to

screw up the Gulf of Mexico? Not anywhere close to that, I can assure you. This is another way that Big Energy keeps innovation out of the game.

[XemaSab]

2. This is totally unsurprising

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and water used for pumped hydro takes water away from somewhere else.

[FBaggins]

3. At $2 Billion for 14,000 MW/h, permitting probably isn't their only problem.

But these kinds of projects need to be built.