US outgoing President Joe Biden has signed a bi-partisan bill into law allowing Arizona utility Salt River Project (SRP) to construct a pumped hydro energy storage project.
SRP has been considering expanding its pumped storage projects on Arizona’s Salt River reservoir system. It has evaluated two potential sites for such facilities above Apache Lake.
The bill, H.R. 1607, involves the US “withdrawing” approximately 17,000 acres (6,880 hectares) of federal land, a process in which the Secretary of the Interior limits the public activity of a designated area of federal land to reserve it for a particular purpose.
In this instance, the land is being reserved to expand SRP’s pumped hydro energy storage project. This type of withdrawal would typically fall under an FPA or FERC withdrawal, which is automatically created upon filing an application for hydroelectric power development with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Read more in Energy Storage News here.
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