A roundly castigated proposal to build a holding reservoir above Isabella Lake in order to pump water up from the lake and run it back down through turbines for power – known as pumped energy storage – is back.
And it brought friends.
There are now three pumped energy storage proposals in Kern County, including the old-now-new-again Isabella proposal.
That proposal and another for a project near Rosamond are undergoing review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for preliminary permits. FERC is seeking public comments on both proposals through Aug 12.
A third proposal, for a project in the mountains above Gorman (though it’s listed as Tehachapi) has an approved preliminary permit from FERC.
That doesn’t mean anyone will be bulldozing hillsides anytime soon, though. A preliminary permit is sort of a placeholder giving the company time to do feasibility studies and gather financing to, perhaps, someday, apply for a license from FERC.
Between those two points lies a whole lotta green, as they say in billiards.
“The project is at a conceptual stage,” wrote Benjamin Mossman in an email of his company’s proposal for a project near Rosamond. Mossman is chief executive director of Roseville company Nightfall Renewables Resources.
“(A preliminary permit) allows Nightfall to invest a significant amount of dollars into the preliminary environmental and engineering studies to determine whether or not to apply for a license and commence the formal environmental review (NEPA) and other FERC requirements,” he wrote.
Then there would be state and county reviews and permits required as well. “This is quite complicated,” Mossman wrote.
Expiration and rebirth
The resurrection of the Isabella proposal comes with an added twist.
In 2021, FERC had issued the project a preliminary permit, which expired this year.
So, even though this new proposal is exactly the same as the one filed in 2020, comments submitted back then don’t “carry over” to the new preliminary permit application. Commenters have to submit their thoughts all over again.
And there were a lot of thoughts, overwhelmingly negative.
Multiple entities, including the City of Bakersfield, Kern River Watermaster, Audubon Society, U.S. Department of the Interior and others, filed motions to become intervenors in the process and nearly 50 individuals submitted comments. Most opposed the project.
But those all expired along with the original preliminary permit.
The new proposal has already drawn comments from a resident who lives near Erskine Creek, one of the alternate sites listed in the proposal, asking pointed questions about safety, road access, taking of private property, fish habitat and more.
“The Erskine dam option would flood private land but that is not communicated anywhere in the permit or Federal register notice. Further some of that private land contains full-time residents who would lose their homes,” wrote Jamin Moore.
Victor Rojas, Managing Director of Premium Energy Holdings LLC, the Walnut company proposing the project, acknowledged by email the company is re-applying for a preliminary permit but didn’t answer further questions.
Premium Energy Holdings is also the applicant on the Tehachapi (Gorman) proposal, which received a preliminary permit in December 2021 with, apparently, zero public comments filed.
Seeing what sticks
A scan of the FERC library shows Premium Energy Holdings has about a dozen preliminary permit applications for pumped storage projects in California, Nevada and Utah in various states of pending, active or expired.
Because of that, several critics consider the Kern proposals mostly “fishing expeditions” to get a foot in the door and test the level of opposition.
“You throw out a bunch of these proposals and if you get entitlement on one, that’s very marketable,” speculated Reed Tolefson, manager of the Audubon Society’s Kern River Preserve near Weldon. “So, maybe the project isn’t shovel-ready, but you get it through the initial hurdles and then you can pursue a lot of the ‘green new deal’ infrastructure money.”
The Audubon Society opposed the Isabella proposal because of potential impacts to a variety of protected areas under the company’s Fay Creek alternative.
The Isabella proposal lists three alternate sites for an upper reservoir: Fay Creek, Erskine Creek or Cane Creek. Respectively, those reservoirs would cover 135, 185 or 400 acres and hold 19,000, nearly 30,000 or 34,400 acre feet of water.
Each site would require extensive construction just for the reservoirs, pipes and turbines. Then they would have to somehow connect to area power stations.
“The irony is, these sorts of energy storage projects do help with climate change issues,” Tolefson said. He stressed that his concern was for protected areas, otherwise he supports the idea of stored energy.
Pumped energy storage projects are akin to batteries, they hold energy until it’s needed. For batteries, you flip a switch. For pumped energy storage, you release water to spin turbines. As California increases its use of solar and wind power, energy storage is needed to supplement the grid when those sources are unavailable.
California has 10 pumped energy storage facilities with a combined ability to produce 4,379 megawatts, according to the California Energy Commission. One megawatt provides an hour’s worth of power for between 600 and 1,200 homes depending on demand.
For comparison, the Isabella project anticipates being able to generate 2,000 megawatts over 12 hours, a “whopping” amount as The Bakersfield Californian reported when the project first came to light in 2020.
And the water?
Aside from wildlife and safety concerns, the other major issue for the Isabella proposal is, of course, water.
Every drop of water in the lake and the branches of the Kern River that feed it, is claimed by one of several entities. Any disruption to those flows, or movement of water out of the lake is closely watched by those entities, known as the Kern River interests.
The Kern River interests opposed the initial Isabella proposal and are reviewing the new application “which raises both questions and potential concerns,” wrote Kern River Watermaster Art Chianello in an email.
Water for the Rosamond and Tehachapi proposed pumped energy storage projects will likely be no easier to come by.
The Tehachapi proposal simply says it will fill one of its three potential reservoirs with between 14,600 and 24,000 acre feet “during high water level season through a new piping segment connected to the existing California Aqueduct.”
It doesn’t state how it would purchase that water, which would have to be through an existing State Water Project contractor.
The Nightfall proposal for a project near Rosamond would require four new above-ground reservoirs and 10,000 acre feet of water, according to the proposal. Other than the reservoirs, everything else would be below ground, operating in a closed loop. The proposal estimates it would need an additional 600 acre feet a year to make up for evaporation.
The water would be purchased from the Antelope Valley-East Kern Water District from a pipeline that runs through Rosamond, according to the proposal.
AVEK General Manager Matt Knudson said no one from Nightfall had contacted the district about this proposal so he had no comment.
Competition
Though pumped energy storage projects can provide a large amount of electricity over many years, they have a high initial cost, take up to a decade or more to build, disrupt large areas of habitat and aren’t as instantaneous as batteries.
Until recently, the big drawback of batteries was they held less power and for shorter periods of time.
That has changed in recent years with development of long duration batteries, making them more competitive with pumped energy storage.
