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Another step toward starting a major new hydropower project that would tunnel beneath the city of Grand Coulee happened Monday when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation published its intent to take proposals for a lease for generating electricity using Lake Roosevelt.

The Bureau published in the Federal Register that it will take applications from non-federal entities for a “lease of power privilege” (LOPP) for a “pumped storage hydroelectric” project that creates power by pumping water up to Banks Lake, then letting it back down through generators to Lake Roosevelt, a scheme to compliment other renewable energy generators, including regional wind and solar farms.

Grand Coulee Dam’s John W. Keyes III Pump-Generating Plant can do the same thing, producing up to 314 megawatts of power.

A new plant proposed by Columbia Basin Hydropower would have a capacity of 500 to 1,000 megawatts using two new penstocks (tunnels) that pass underneath the city and power generators in an underground powerplant.

At an estimated $1.4 billion, the project would dwarf CBH’s seven other hydropower plants, including the one at the south end of Banks Lake and the Summer Falls project, its largest at 94 MW, on Billy Clap Lake south of Coulee City.

But so far, the USBR’s LOPP would only cover a portion of the federal permissions for Banks Lake Hydropower project. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would have a large role, too, with most of the infrastructure falling under its oversight, as does CBH’s plant at Dry Falls Dam at the other end of the lake. Legislation to change that has not passed Congress.

Pursuing that parallel permission track has been on the back burner until now, said CBH Secretary Manager Darvin Fales. “Now that the LOPP process is started, the time clock is started,” he said.

“There are a lot of steps between now and getting our LOPP or FERC license,” Fales said, still projecting that the new facility would come online commercially in late 2026 or 2027.

One of those steps is securing a financing partner. Fales said CBH has spoken with utilities that are projecting the need to secure more power capacity by 2026.

That said, under the federal rules, Bonneville Power Administration gets first crack at the new source before its electricity could be sold to other utilities.

Although CBH has been working on the proposal for years, the Bureau’s LOPP process is open to anyone. Fales said he has heard of another possible interest but does not know who that is.

The eventual developer would be obligated to pay the government two- to three-tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour of energy produced.

Asked about expected day-to-day operations, Fales said the new units would normally cause a drop of a few inches over a few hours in Banks Lake during high demand cycles, characterizing the effect as “pretty minimal, actually.”

https://www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/cbp/johnkeys/index.html

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-08-31/pdf/2020-19155.pdf