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Idaho’s Cat Creek Energy and Water Project: A Major Planned Pumped Storage and Generation Facility
The proposed site for the upper reservoir of the Cat Creek pumped storage facility.
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Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
12 | HYDRO LEADER | June 2021
Peggy Beltrone: I’ve taken an unusual route to clean energy development and what I believe is the West’s most consequential energy and water project of the century— CCEW. My first job after college was in television news in Great Falls, Montana. Later, when I saw that I could do more inside of government than reporting on it, I won a seat on the Cascade County commission. After years of making tough budget decisions that often had me choosing between law enforcement and public health or libraries and food banks, I searched for extra funds for county services in wind energy. I also saw it as a smart way to bring jobs to our community. Our county’s economy was anchored by another renewable energy source: hydropower. Taxes levied on five NorthWestern Energy dams along the Missouri River funded almost one-third of our rural area services. In a county with powerful class 4 wind, it just made sense that my budgeting job would be easier with more high-value clean energy. I worked with our staff to create a wind energy marketing program to attract wind development. The effort
PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT CREEK ENERGY & WATER.
he Cat Creek Energy & Water project (CCEW) is a major pumped storage and renewable energy generation project that is scheduled to be built north of Mountain Home, Idaho, on the South Fork of the Boise River. The project, which will use the Bureau of Reclamation’s Anderson Ranch Reservoir as its lower reservoir, will have a total of 1,100 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity—380 MW of on- and offsite wind and solar and 720 MW of pumped storage hydropower—and its large upper reservoir will be able to support 5 full days of full hydropower generation. CCEW has just signed several contracts with Voith Hydro to design, manufacture, install, and maintain its state-of-the-art ternary pumped storage equipment. In this interview, Cat Creek’s public policy advisor, Peggy Beltrone, tells Hydro Leader about how the project will help integrate renewables into the energy grid, capture and store water, and generate clean energy for the future.
