Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) announced the grand prize winners in the Furthering Advancements to Shorten Time (FAST) Commissioning for Pumped-Storage Hydropower Prize competition, which aims to help accelerate commissioning times and reduce cost and risk in PSH projects.

"This prize sought fresh solutions and technologies from innovators to address the non-regulatory challenges that PSH developers face when deploying new projects such as significant upfront capital costs, a lack of market certainty, and long construction times," said Daniel R Simmons, DOE’s Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. "The grand prize-winning ideas for this key storage technology will help bring more PSH online to support increased integration of variable renewable resources like wind and solar."

Competitors proposed technical solutions to accelerate commissioning times for PSH at today’s Pitch Day event, the final stage of the competition. The grand prize winners were selected from a group of nine concept stage winners, who were given three months and 50 hours of in-kind technical support from the partnering DOE National Laboratories, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to develop their ideas.

The four grand prize winners received up to $550,000 in vouchers and cash prizes. They are: