Rye Development, a portfolio company of Climate Adaptive Infrastructure, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive $81 million to advance its Lewis Ridge pumped storage project in southeastern Kentucky.
The project will convert former mine land in Bell County into a closed-loop, 287-megawatt pumped storage hydropower facility, with the capacity to store electricity for up to eight hours and generate electricity to power 67,000 homes.
The Lewis Ridge Project will be one of the first pumped storage hydropower facilities constructed in the United States in more than 30 years and the first ever to be built on former mine land, according to Rhy Development.
Rye Development is one of five organizations that received Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding as part of the DOE’s Clean Energy Demonstration Program on Current and Former Mine Land (CEML).
“This project is not only a significant investment in Kentucky; it’s an investment in str
