There is an isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top in Big Sky Country, South Central Montana. The grid passes nearby the butte to collect electricity from a wind farm. Therefore this makes it a perfect place to generate electricity with gravity. We call it nature’s new water battery because pumped storage will allow the operator to store and release electricity to serve the grid.
Regulatory Commission Approves New Water Battery
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the hydroelectricity project in mid-November 2017, and granted it a 50-year operating license. There were no objections to the new water battery since the operator framed the design without adverse environmental impacts.
The upper and lower dams will form a closed system drawing water from nearby Cottonwood Creek. The vertical distance between the two dams will be about 1,000 feet. The 4,000 acre-foot capacity upper reservoir will have generating capacity of approximately 400 megawatts, which it will deliver for twelve hours every day.
A Quick Profile of the Gordon Butte Project
Construction will commence in 2018. When completed, the new water battery costing approximately $986 million will make an estimated annual profit of $47 million. Thus, it will return a tidy profit of $2,350 million over 50 years.
This is compelling proof of the financial advantage of generating electricity with carbon-free gravity and water. As opposed to oil, gas, and coal. And nuclear, which revealed the seeds of its own destruction at Chernobyl, and Fukushima after safety batteries ran down.
The new water battery will be especially attractive to local utilities, because it not only supplies energy. It also buys it back too – albeit at a lower rate – when they have surplus in off-peak periods. Now that is something oil, gas, and coal, and nuclear could never do. Go for it Gordon Butte. We are behind you all the way.
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Preview Image: Overview of Pumped Storage Scheme
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