Energy Storage and Environmental Justice: A Critical Examination of a Proposed Pumped Hydropower Facility in Goldendale, Washington

Abstract

Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind produce electricity intermittently, creating challenges in balancing electricity supply and demand for increasingly renewable-dominated grids. This is driving efforts to increase energy storage infrastructure, such as pumped hydroelectric power storage (pumped storage). In this research, we examine environmental justice issues in a case study of a proposed pumped storage facility in Goldendale, Washington, which has been highly controversial and actively contested by a coalition of Indigenous and environmental communities. Drawing from frameworks of political ecology, just transitions, and Indigenous environmental justice, we focus on processes of consultation and engagement around permitting as a key arena for environmental justice contestation, and critically examine the driving assumptions behind the project. Despite popular framings of renewable energy infrastructures as new and green, we argue that the environmental justice impacts of this and similar projects represent continuity with past patterns of settler colonialism and extractive development.