Federal grant of $2.5 million allows NREL and Colorado Springs to explore storing energy of water that cascades off Peaks Peak
by Allen Best
Water that powers the turbines at the Manitou Hydroelectric Plant in Colorado thunders 2,656 feet down from reservoirs on the northern slopes of Pikes Peak, producing 1,150 pounds per square inch of water pressure.
That gives it a rare distinction among other hydro plants in the United States. Only two other turbines, both in California, have as much “head,” as this descent is called.
That plant in Manitou Springs will gain a further distinction in coming years. It is to be a center of research revolving around whether hydropower can be married to hydrogen to further decarbonize the electricity grid.
Colorado Springs Utilities, which operates the plant, and its partners, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine, have received a federal grant of a little more than $3 million for the investigation.
The grant was the largest among nine announced in November for research and development projects in the United States that seek to increase hydropower’s ability to respond to changing demands on the electric grid.
Hydropower currently accounts for nearly 27% of U.S. utility-scale renewable electricity generation, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. It accounts for 6% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation.
Another project funded by the Department of Energy will deliver $2.5 million to a project in California that will seek to marry hydro with battery storage. A similar coupling of hydro and battery storage in North Carolina will get $2 million, according to the November announcement
Other projects looked at the same challenge in different ways. NREL is involved in several of them. One of those projects will attempt to leverage artificial intelligence to develop approaches to hydropower operations that consider weather forecasting, market price forecasting, and water and electricity constraints. Key players in that project are NREL, the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the Western Area Power Administration, and the Southwestern Power Administration.
At Manitou Springs, the problem to be solved is how the hydropower can be leveraged to better conform with demands. In theory, the water could be released from the reservoirs to produce electricity exactly when Colorado Springs needs it. In reality, the water must be released based on other needs as well, including the demands of those with more senior water rights down the creek and river.
That’s why storing some of the hydroelectricity as hydrogen would be of value. The electricity could be used to power electrolyzers to create hydrogen from water. The hydrogen could also be used as fuel for vehicles, according to the announcement by the Department of Energy.
The DOE announcement provoked questions from experts contacted by Big Pivots that were intended to be posed to the project participants.
These questions were posed to the NREL lead on this project in early December, but the questions could not be answered until January, he said via an NREL spokesman on Dec. 19. Then answers were promised after Jan. 20, but now the NREL public affairs team reports a pause in media interviews while procedures are reviewed with the new Department of Energy administration. This has occurred at DOE with nearly every administration change, I am told.
Colorado Springs Utilities also has had nothing to say about this since the DOE announcement in November.
Here are the questions:
1) Who initiated this project?
2) Why was the Manitou hydro plant chosen for this application instead of any number of other hydro plants in Colorado and beyond? (I am aware of all the grants that were announced, at least in this grant cycle).
3) Is this project intended to investigate the feasibility of hydrogen for shorter-term or longer-term storage?
4) If shorter-term, then how might the production of electricity be compatible with or in conflict with the pumped-storage hydro project that I believe provides some of the water at the Manitou Hydro plant?
5) How would the hydrogen be converted to electricity? I seem to understand the choices are fuel cells or combustion turbines. Are there other options?
6) What can be said about the challenge of containing the hydrogen, preventing or reducing leaks, given that hydrogen more easily leaks than some other substances?
7) The DOE announcement says that that the hydrogen can be used both for power or fuel for electric and hydrogen vehicles. Is this indeed part of the work on the Manitou project?
Research similar to that planned in Manitou Springs has been underway elsewhere. In 2023, two federal labs in the Columbia River Basin began partnering with Idaho Power to determine the viability of using hydropower to produce hydrogen. Idaho Power hopes to use this technology to achieve 100% clean energy by 2045.\
Hydropower has played a crucial role in delivering baseload power but also flexibility to the region, explains Power.
Even in the much-wetter Pacific Northwest, though, flexibility of both run-of-the-river hydro projects and pumped-storage hydro can be constrained by site-specific requirements for environmental flows, irrigation, navigation, creation, flood control, and other services that often take priority over power production.
“By capturing the off-peak energy production as hydrogen, the hydrogen can be electrified during peak energy demand,” said Daniel Wendt, the principal investigator and researcher on the project on behalf of the Idaho National Laboratory. Another project partner is Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The project could stabilize the grid and offer a cleaner alternative to fossil fuel backup power generation, noted the federal lab in an announcement.
The excess oxygen produced as a byproduct of hydrogen generation could also address water quality issues in the rivers. Reservoirs behind dams may have low levels of dissolved oxygen, particularly during summer and early fall. Dissolved oxygen in a river is necessary for fish and other aquatic species.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, in section 45V, provides production tax credit of $3 for every kilogram of clean hydrogen.
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