Nobody has built a major new pumped hydro plant in America since Bill Clinton was president. A developer in rural Washington just broke the streak, and not everyone thinks that's a good thing.
Pumped hydro works like a giant water battery. Pump water uphill when electricity is cheap and plentiful, let it rush back down through turbines when it's not. The idea is a century old and still makes up roughly 95 percent of all grid scale energy storage in the country.
Almost none of that capacity is new. The last time federal regulators approved a project of this scale was twelve years ago, a $1.4 billion facility called Eagle Mountain planned for an abandoned iron mine in the California desert. That project still hasn't broken ground and now says it hopes to start construction in 2028, a reminder that a federal license is a beginning, not a finish line, according to Energy Central's coverage of the Eagle Mountain comparison.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a 40 year license for the Goldendale Energy Storage Project, a 1,200 megawatt facility in Klickitat County, Washington. Rye Development had been working toward this exact day for seven years.
"This is a landmark moment for the Pacific Northwest," said Erik Steimle, Rye's chief development officer, in the developer's own announcement, framing the license as an answer to a region where electricity demand is projected to grow more than 30 percent over the next decade. FERC's own chair, Laura Swett, called it worth a direct thank you to the developer, noting how rare an approval like this actually is, according to Capital Press's coverage of the licensing decision.
The site sits on 681 acres that once held an aluminum smelter, eight miles from the town of Goldendale. Once running, it's expected to generate 3.5 million megawatt hours a year, enough for roughly 500,000 homes, and to hold that power for up to twelve hours at a stretch.
For scale, Washington's four Lower Snake River dams together generated 5.3 million megawatt hours in 2024, and the state's only nuclear plant produced 9.8 million megawatt hours in 2022, as High Country News lays out in its account of the project. Notably, Goldendale's own reservoirs won't sit on the Columbia River itself. The system draws its initial fill from an adjacent intake pool, then largely recirculates the same water in a closed loop, topping up only what's lost to evaporation, a deliberate break from the dam building era that reshaped this same river a century ago. Construction is expected to create around 3,000 jobs, with Rye targeting commercial operation by 2032.
Goldendale's projected 3.5 million MWh a year set against Washington's four Lower Snake River dams (5.3 million MWh, 2024) and the state's only nuclear plant (9.8 million MWh, 2022).
To Rye Development, the site is a former industrial lot. To the Yakama Nation, it's Pushpum, meaning mother of all roots, one of the last seasonal gathering grounds where the Ḱamíłpa Band harvests heirloom root vegetables their ancestors have gathered here for generations.
FERC's own environmental review acknowledged the project will destroy five archaeological sites. Twenty tribal governments and organizations oppose the project in total, including the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Nez Perce Tribe, and the National Congress of American Indians, according to Columbia Gorge News. "They know it's wrong," Yakama Tribal Council Chairman Gerald Lewis said after the license was issued, in remarks reported by the Yakima Herald-Republic. "If a small Christian shrine sat on this site, the decision-makers would understand what sacred means." In May, tribal members held a ceremony at the site itself. "We're letting them know that we're still against this project," said Yakama tribal leader Jeremy Takala, per the Goldendale Sentinel's local reporting.
Columbia Riverkeeper and the Yakama Nation are now co-petitioners challenging the federal license in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing the government approved the project without adequate tribal consultation and on an incomplete environmental review.
Simone Anter, a senior staff attorney with Columbia Riverkeeper, confirmed the litigation is active. The group's own public statement called FERC's decision "disgraceful in its negligence" and argued the federal government has a legal obligation to honor tribal sovereignty and treaty rights before approving a project like this one, not after. The Washington State Environmental Justice Council has formally adopted a position standing with the Yakama Nation, calling for a standard of free, prior, and informed consent that this approval, they argue, never met.
Rye has two years to start construction under its new license, with commercial operation targeted for 2032. The lawsuit could still change that timeline, or the outcome entirely. Both clocks are running at the same time, and nobody involved seems to expect the other side to simply stop.
Eagle Mountain is the cautionary tale sitting in the background of all of this. Even a fully licensed pumped hydro project can sit unbuilt for over a decade once the paperwork is done, tangled up in financing, contracts, and the ordinary friction of very large infrastructure. Whether Goldendale ends up generating power for half a million homes, or joins Eagle Mountain as a license nobody ever built on, may depend less on the electricity math than on a fight over one 681 acre stretch of land that two very different institutions both call sacred, for very different reasons.