400 MW Pumped Storage Project Wins FERC Approval
Engineering360 News Desk | December 23, 2016The 400 megawatt (MW) Gordon Butte Pumped Storage Hydro project located in Montana has been issued a 50-year license to construct and operate by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Final design is to be completed in 2017 with construction anticipated to begin in 2018.
The project will utilize ternary equipment provided by GE Renewables, allowing the plant to move between pumping and generating.
Concept drawing of the Gordon Butte project in Montana.This facility will provide ancillary and balancing capabilities to Montana’s renewable energy industry as well as provide multiple services to facilitate stability, reliability, growth, and longevity to existing energy infrastructure and resources in the state and region.
The facility will consist of upper and lower closed-loop reservoirs connected by an underground concrete and steel-lined hydraulic shaft. The project will be an off-stream facility, constructed outside of any existing watersheds. Each reservoir will be approximately 4,000 feet long and 1,000 feet wide with depths of 50 to 75 feet.
As designed, an underground powerhouse with four turbine-generators would be located at the bottom reservoir. These generators would provide an installed capacity of 400 MW, allowing for an estimated annual energy generation of 1,300 gigawatt hours.
GB Energy Park received its preliminary permit from the FERC in 2013. On Oct. 1, 2015, GB Energy Park filed its Final License Application for the project with FERC. The Commission accepted the license application as complete on Nov. 16, 2015 and issued its Environmental Analysis with a Finding of No Significant Impacts on Sept. 27, 2016.
Based in Montana, Absaroka Energy is developing the project. The Gordon Butte project is sited in Meagher County and located about three miles west of Martinsdale and less than six miles from the Colstrip twin 500 kV transmission lines, part of Montana's electric system. This interconnection location will give the facility access to markets in Montana and throughout the region.
Very similar to the New York Power Authority (NYPA) Blenheim-Gilboa Pump-storage facility, located southwest of Albany. Built in the early 1970s and in the process of a serious upgrade in performance and efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia
It always helps when nature provides one of the storage reservoirs, usually the lower one, like, for example, Lake Michigan for the Ludington pumped storage upper reservoir on a bluff 100+ meters above the lake. Another one coming along is the outer Hebrides project to arbitrage the existing and growing wind generation, with an undersea cable to transfer electric power toward Scotland proper; the proposal is to use the Atlantic Ocean as the lower reservoir, which, of course even with a lined reservoir, presents the concern for long term saline water intrusion into the groundwater of the upper basin footprint:
http://www.powerengi