Dormant coal mines holding billions of gallons of water could be critical components of efforts to commercialize pumped storage hydropower technology and make it more widely available in Indiana. Submitted photo
Kevin Ellett, co-founder and president of Carbon Solutions LLC, poses in a mine that is a potential site for the company’s PSHAUM technology project. Submitted photo
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INDIANAPOLIS — As Indiana and other states began to move away from coal and fossil fuel production as primary energy sources in the late 20th century, dozens of coal mines in the southern part of the state were left abandoned.
State lawmakers are discussing legislation that cou ld return those mines to service with a different purpose. Researchers at IUPUI and Bloomington-based Carbon Solutions LLC, have developed plans for converting some of them for use as pumped storage hydropower stations. The renewable energy source utilizes two reservoirs at different elevations to generate power. Water moving back and forth between the reservoirs passes through a turbine to produce power that can be converted to electricity. The country’s appetite for cheaper, cleaner and more renewable forms of energy has given rise to pumped storage hydropower, which according to the U.S. Department of Energy, comprises 95% of all utility-scale energy storage in the United States.
At first glance, however, Indiana, with its relatively flat terrain, might not seem to offer the type of sharp land contouring that pumped storage hydro power stations require.
“Our highest point is like 800 feet above sea level,” said Peter Schubert a professor of electrical and computer engineering at IUPUI and the director of the Lugar Center for Renewable Energy. “We don’t have much topography. Even in the southern part of the state, there are sharp hills, but they’re not tall.”
Appointed to the state’s 21st Century Energy Task Force by Gov. Eric Holcomb, Schubert has been involved with research on renewable energy resources to complement wind and solar power for more than two decades. The technology behind pumped hydro storage, he said, is not new. But only recently has the idea of using dormant coal mines to apply it gained momentum.
“In the Midwest there’s very few of these pumped storage hydro (facilities), so the idea came to us through my advisory board (at the Lugar Center) to say, what about instead of the elevation being up, let’s turn it upside down and think about how deep could we go?”
Tapping these underground mines, he said, would remove numerous complications in the process of bringing new stations online. Prominent among them is that obtaining proper permits and complying with a multitude of federal, state and local regulations is cumbersome and, in many cases, cost prohibitive. “California has been trying for many years, but they’re talking about taking two pristine valleys and flooding them. You can just imagine what the citizens say about that,” Schubert said. “Now people are talking about it being a 20-year regulating permitting process. If you start a project like that, you’re paying interest on the amount of money you’ve got for that, so that makes it very uncompetitive.”
If the permitting process can be successfully navigated, environmental advocates believe the technology — termed Pumped-Storage Hydropower using Abandoned Underground Mines (PSHAUM) — holds great potential.
“I think it’s a promising technology that could serve us well with respect to long-term, long-duration storage,” Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, told the Indiana Senate Committee on Utilities during testimony in January. “I also think it’s a valuable tool for bringing new jobs and economic development to coal communities.”
Schubert and his team at IUPUI have been working with Carbon Solutions LLC, a Bloomington-based startup focusing on low-carbon energy research, to develop and refine the technology which would allow the mines to be converted. One site of interest, the Gibson Generating Station near Owensville in southwest Indiana, offers mines at an ideal depth for testing. The company recently won a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Small Business Innovation Research Program for a study to examine how the project’s PSHAUM technology could work in tandem with the power plants such as Gibson Station.
“What they’re interested in is, how can we develop new technologies that are actually co-located with those power plants so that those power plants can become more efficient?” said Kevin Ellett, co-founder and president of Carbon Solutions. “The idea is to save rate payers money by doing that.”
Figuring out a way to lessen the wear and tear on components and maintain the plant’s efficiency is a key goal, Ellett added. With a reservoir at the surface that already has the proper permits and holds several billion gallons of water and similar-sized mines below it, sites like Gibson could effectively host sizable grid scale batteries once the technology is fully developed.
“In terms of the scale and what we’ve looked at in our early work, this really could be adopted at numerous sites in Indiana and then of course across the U.S.,” Ellett said. “That’s where you get to the game changing part.”
The concept has bipartisan support in the Indiana Legislature. A bill that would add pumped storage hydropower to the state’s list of 21 recognized clean energy projects in its voluntary clean energy portfolio standard program recently passed the Senate unanimously and appears poised to clear the House in similar fashion.
“This bill recognizes the potential to use in particular coal mines that had been decommissioned because of our move away from coal and repurpose them to generate hydro storage instead of coal,” said Sen. Eric Koch, R-Bedford, who authored Senate Bill 147. “We’ve not limited the bill to coal mines. We mention limestone quarries and any other suitable area as well.”
Schubert said even though the technology is still in the early stages of development, he’s encouraged by the feedback he’s received from both lawmakers and environmental advocates alike.
“I think they see this as an opportunity for Indiana to be a leader in renewable energy technology,” he said.
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