Energy & Water: Eagle Crest Storage Project Nearing Permit Finish Line

The proposed 1,300 MW Eagle Crest pumped storage project in Riverside County expects to receive a federal license by the end of 2011. However, a local citizens’ group may sue to halt the estimated $1.4 billion hydropower storage project using abandoned mine pits. “We are hopeful that at the end of the year we will conclude our work with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,” said Eagle Crest president Steve Lowe. “There’s a right way and a wrong way” to develop renewable energy projects, said Donna Charpied, Citizens of Chuckwalla Valley executive director. “This is the wrong way.” The project is slated to cover 2,220 acres of disturbed land, 1,060 of which are on federal public lands. The project is to store thousands of acre-feet of groundwater in abandoned mine pits and release it when power prices are high and/or supplies are short. FERC staff recommended a license last December (Current, Jan. 7, 2011). The key issue is mining water from the Chuckwalla aquifer, and its rate of recharge. Water contamination is another. Also of concern are possible impacts to the threatened desert tortoise. The project would initially take about 25,000 acre-feet of water from the Chuckwalla water basin to fill the mine pits. The pits would be replenished with another 1,800 acre-feet annually, according to Lowe. (One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons). At the end of last month, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which is working on the permitting with FERC, agreed to issue a federal license--although an assessment of possible tortoise impacts could not be completed before that time. The project owners are unable to access the private land they hope to buy. “We are proposing this approach due to the unusual circumstances of this proposal, and in particular, our understanding that legal access to the project site will not be obtained until after license issuance,” Kennon Corey, FWS assistant field supervisor, wrote in a May 20 letter to FERC. “That’s putting the cart before the horse,” admonished Charpied, making the agency ripe for a lawsuit. Lowe said any impact to tortoises would be “de minimis” given the disturbed nature of the land. Water impacts remain at center stage. Charpied said Eagle Crest’s predicted water consumption, plus water pumping from planned and proposed solar projects on public lands, would leave the area high and dry, turning it into “another Owens Valley.” A key state agency and major water purveyor--the State Water Resources Control Board and the Metropolitan Water District--concluded that the Eagle Crest project’s water impacts can be mitigated with proper engineering. Pumped storage projects are used to meet peak demand, but are seen as filling a power gap arising from the growing use of intermittent renewable supplies, including solar and wind power, as well as fossil and nuclear supplies.

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Energy & Water: Eagle Crest Storage Project Nearing Permit Finish Line

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