The Water Power Technologies Office is issuing a Notice of Opportunity for Technical Assistance to perform techno-economic studies—including cost-benefit, power market, financial, and valuation analyses—to evaluate the long-term value of two selected pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) projects. These studies will provide PSH developers the capability to estimate the value of a proposed PSH project and compare financial revenue streams under current market structures relative to the economic value of PSH to the grid.

The techno-economic studies will be carried out by a Technical Assistance team comprising subject matter experts from the following DOE national laboratories: Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The Technical Assistance team has developed draft guidance for methodologies and approaches to PSH valuation. Through these studies, the team will test and refine the valuation guidance, after which the guidance and valuation tools will be transferred to the industry and made publicly available.

These techno-economic studies will support a larger multi-year research strategy to define the capabilities and estimate the value that hydropower and PSH resources contribute to electric grid resiliency and reliability and how those contributions could be altered for a changing grid.