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Early last year, the hydropower company Nature and People First set its sights on Black Mesa, a mountainous region on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. The mesa’s steep drop offered ideal terrain for gravity-based energy storage, and the company was interested in building pumped-storage projects that leveraged the elevation difference. Environmental groups and tribal community organizations, however, largely opposed the plan. Pumped-storage operations involve moving water in and out of reservoirs, which could affect the habitats of endangered fish and require massive groundwater withdrawals from an already-depleted aquifer.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over non-federal hydropower projects on the Colorado River and its tributaries, ultimately denied the project’s permit. The decision was among the first under a new policy: FERC would not approve projects on tribal land without the support of the affected tribe. Since the project was on Navajo land and the Navajo Nation opposed the project, FERC denied the permits. The Commission also denied similar permit requests from Rye Development, a Florida-based company, that also proposed pumped-water projects.

Now, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright wants to reverse this policy. In October, Wright wrote to FERC, requesting that the commission return to its previous policy and that giving tribes veto power was hindering the development of hydropower projects. The commission’s policy has created an “untenable regime,” he noted, and “For America to continue dominating global energy markets, we must remove unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure, including hydropower projects.”