Pineville, Ky. — A massive dam project is slated for Bell County.
It’s a first of its kind project that could bring more than 1000 jobs to Bell County, Kentucky. Dubbed the Lewis Ridge Pump Storage Project, the $1.3billion hydropower facility would be built on the site of a former coal mine.
The Appalachian Mountains are the backdrop to Kentucky’s lumber and coal mining history. Mike Gambrel has been a witness to it. “The very top portion up here is where the stripping was done about 10 or 12 years ago and it’s all reclaimed,” Gambrel tells Spectrum News 1 on a tour of the site.
Gambrel has more than 30 years experience on this very mountain. “Degree in mining engineering... worked for coal mines for 41 years as an engineer,” Gambrel added.
For the past five years, the Bell County native has been general manager for Asher Land and Mineral Gas Property. Asher owns more than 30,000 acres in Kentucky, leasing land to coal mining operations as well as 12,000 acres to the Appalachian Wildlife foundation and other entities.
Now, for the first time in his entire career, Gambrel’s focus has shifted from coal to another natural resource: water. “You pump from this one, gravity feeds it back from the upper one and generate your power that way,” Gambrel explained.
The future site of the Lewis Ridge Pump Storage Project a hydroelectric power plant consists of an upper and lower water reservoir. It’s located several miles outside of Pineville, along the Lewis Ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, not far from the Kentucky and Tennessee border. Harlan County is 30 miles to the East.
Rye Development, with its corporate headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida, will build the plant on the site of a former coal mine owned by Asher Land. The Department of Energy has awarded Rye an $81 million grant to get the project moving. “And they wanted it to be something on coal-mined land, which is exactly this project.”
Construction of the facility is projected to create as many as 1500 jobs and take upward of 10 years to complete in an area of Kentucky where unemployment is high due to a struggling coal industry. Many of these jobs are well suited for anyone who may have worked in the coal industry.
“And those people can jump right in. It’s the same type of equipment that you’ll have to move dirt with, trucks, loaders, dozers. People that are well qualified in this area, not just Bell County, but you’ll get people from Harlan County, Knox County, Whitley County, Clay County, Leslie County,” Gambrel explained.
And once online, the power plant may serve to attract new industries to this area of Kentucky. “Once this facility is here and producing electricity, it will open us up to be able to recruit different industries that want consistent, reliable power such as cloud storage, data processing. You know those companies lose millions of dollars if they are down for a day,” Bell County Judge Executive Albey Brock said. “If you’re adjacent to a power plant that is producing, you know, hydro power well then you’re going to know that the reliability is there.”
So as Lewis Ridge checks a lot of the boxes for the Department of Energy — being a former coal mountain, proximity to a river and near high capacity power lines — in a way, the project also checks a box for Gambrel. “It’ll be here for 100 years, generating power to put on the grid. You know I’ll be dead and gone in 100 years and nobody will know I had a hand in it, but that’s OK. It’ll kind of be my legacy,” Gambrel said. At 68 years old, Gambrel says his working days are nearing an end, and this is a chance to leave his mark.