[All-Gorge] ⚡ Who Permits the River Line? - July Round-Up

Join us for the July round-up of the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, the board that decides where the Gorge's big energy projects go. A Skamania County councilmember asks who actually permits the underwater power line proposed for the Columbia, and the answer surprises. Plus a new director, two ownership transfers that drew zero public comment, a plan to make the state's one nuclear plant produce more power, and a correction we owe you.

In This Episode:

• Why there is no local county permit for the Cascade Renewable Transmission line, and where the real comment window is
• Marco Lowe steps in as EFSEC's new executive director, and there is no August meeting
• Columbia Solar and Goose Prairie Solar change owners, with a Norwegian sovereign wealth fund among the buyers
• A correction on Ostrea Solar's operating status
• Energy Northwest wants to uprate the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant near Richland
• Horse Heaven's final turbine layout, and Badger Mountain's wait on the power grid

Resources & Links:

• Read the full written Dispatch at skamaniadispatch.com
• Our June EFSEC edition, for the resource-adequacy backstory: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/the-northwest-is-nine-gigawatts-short-efsec-june-2026/
• Our special report on the Cascade Renewable Transmission line: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/special-report-cascade-renewable-transmission-an-underwater-power-line-with-a-long-road-ahead/
• EFSEC agendas, packets, and project pages: efsec.wa.gov
• Comment on active projects: comments.efsec.wa.gov

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. I'm glad you're here. Today we're back with an all-gorge episode on one of the few statewide agencies that we get to cover at the dispatch. It's the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council. So if you're tired of saying all that in one breath, you can just say FSEC. And if you live in the Gorge, FSEC is the state board that decides where the big energy projects go. The solar farms, battery plants, and a power line that would run right down the Columbia River. FSEC met twice in July, a site tour on the 7th and the regular monthly meeting on the 15th. So let's get into it. I'm going to start with the one that matters the most if you live in Scamania County. You've probably heard about the Cascade Renewable Transmission Line. It's a big power line meant to take energy from where it's produced out east, much of it from renewable sources like solar or wind, and move it west to the larger population centers that have the most need. And most of that line would run underwater along the bed of the Columbia River. About 40 miles of it are on the Washington side. It crosses Scamania, Likitat, and Clark counties. At the July meeting, a Scamania County Council member named Ace Leckie, who you may also know from the Scamania County Board of Commissioners, asks a simple question. Does this project go through any local county permitting? Because, as he put it, as far as he knows, there's no local process for a project like this one. So here's the answer that the staff gave him. No, there's no separate local permit. The state process absorbs all of it. Grading permits, building permits, all of it gets wrapped in. If the county wants conditions on how that line crosses Kumanian land, those conditions have to get written into the state's own site certificate. There's no county permit counter for this one. So we'll sit with that for a second. If you've got something to say about the power line, the place to say it is actually not going to be the county courthouse or county meeting. It would be right here at this meeting at FSEC. And the moment that matters to say something, of course, is right now. FSEC's project page shows that the comment period on the line's land use is open, running through August 26th, right before the council makes his land use decision. So this is the window. And I'll say it again at the end so you don't forget and you get to write that down on your calendar. Alright, now let's talk next about a changing of the guard. FSEC has a new executive director. His name is Marco Lowe. He was introduced on the 15th and he told the council that he was on quote day 2.5. So very brand new at the time of this meeting. He takes over from Dave Walker, who had been the interim director and who got a warm send-off. Here's a little housekeeping note that'll matter if you follow this board. There is no FSEC meeting in August. That date is going to a staff training instead. So the next regular meeting is going to be in September. Now on to our votes. The council approved two ownership transfers. Both are solar projects and both are changing hands at the corporate level. One is called Columbia Solar, and it's moving into a company called Altus Power. The other is Goose Prairie Solar, and its new owner is an investment platform that includes Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund. That's the fund built on that country's oil money. Now here's the part worth noticing. Both of those transfers drew zero public comment, not one person. The hearings were held back in June and nobody spoke, and the two votes in July took about four minutes between them. Now that might sound kind of strange, but actually that's the system working the way it's designed to. Usually once all of the research has gone into the front end and all of the paperwork has cleared, it should be pretty straightforward to oversee whether or not a transfer goes through. But that does mean that we're seeing big global investors move into Washington's solar fleet through a process that most folks never see. And that's why I enjoy getting to cover FSEC as a part of this podcast. This particular agency is very interesting because it controls so much of the end result of the experience that we have here, where power comes from, where it goes, whether we have enough load during certain times of year. And it happens through an agency that actually kind of operates a lot of times out of the public eye. And I think more people would enjoy keeping up with the processes that happen here. Not only because it affects how land is used, but also to appreciate all of the work that goes into making sure that, especially in the coldest parts of winter, all of us have enough power to keep ourselves warm and safe. So next up, I actually owe you a correction, and I want to be straight about it because it's also a cool way to lift the hood on how we do things over here at this podcast and the research that goes into each episode. So last month we told you that the Ostrea Stiller project was up and running commercially. That's not quite right, and we fixed it both here and in the written edition. So here's the real picture. The project's operator told the council that Bonneville had cleared it to operate and that it had been running since about April, but FSEC's own written record tells a different story. It still lists that facility is under construction and not yet operational. So when those two things disagree, we try our best to go with the official written record. Last month we didn't, but now we have. So we've also gone back in the written edition and placed that correction. So corrections like the one above are actually, in my opinion, part of the fun process of maintaining our own public meetings database. We keep that ourselves of both the recording transcripts and the written record for more than the 30 plus agencies that OpenGorge follows. We find sometimes that these records don't always line up, and it's not for any malicious reason, but because these are active, complex processes. Our database actually automatically flags these conflicts as quote, open cases. So it can be quite satisfying to get updates in later meetings or in written packets that help us close and correct them. I'd like to think that our process would make Benoit Blanc himself quite proud. So, while we're still on Australia, there was a small brush fire there back in May. The investigation's closed now. A piece of equipment came loose, pinched a cable, and a spark caught the dry brush underneath. This is the kind of risk that happens with almost every type of industrial facility, and the response here is exactly what we hoped to see, with systems again working as intended. The panel and the stretch of cable were replaced, nobody was hurt, it was responded to very quickly, and crews are out mowing the site now with a water truck right behind them to cut the fire risk before the dry end of summer. That's the kind of preparation that we like to see. So, all right, let's talk about the item that took the longest stretch in the meeting, the nuclear plant. You may not know this, but Washington has one nuclear power plant. It's called the Columbia Generating Station and it's near Richland. Energy Northwest, the outfit that runs it, came to FSEC with a plan to make it produce more power. Now, the industry term is an extended power up rate. In plain English, that means they want to squeeze more electricity out of the same reactor. Right now the plant puts out about 1,200 megawatts. This plan would push that roughly to 1,380 megawatts by 2031. That's a big jump, and Chair Beckett note it's the first time in something like 50 years that the state's one nuclear plant has come before the council for a change this big. Two things stood out to me. First, water. Councilmember Kate Dean asked how much Columbia River water the plant would need in order to make this change. The honest answer was they're still working out those calculations. It's a slight increase, they say, and they've started talking to the state about the whole plant's water needs, not just this one project. In the gorge, water, of course, is never a small question. Second, tribal consultation. Kate Dean asked about that too, and the answer was noticeably thin. Nobody could point to a clear, project-specific process. And the chair, Kurt Beckett, said plainly that it needs to be a priority. So nothing's decided yet. This is just the very first briefing. There are going to be years of review ahead for this change, but it's coming, and of course, we'll keep watching it. Let's hit two more quickly. Horse Heaven. That's the big wind farm over in the Tri-Cities. It's not a gorge project, but it's the biggest thing on FSEC's plate. And as we know from many other prior episodes on FSEC, many of the processes that are formed in other parts of the state actually come to affect how things get done here in the gorge on our projects. So the developer settled its final layout. Fewer turbines than before, 116 instead of 147, but the taller design, up to 671 feet at the blade tip. FSEC decided no new environmental study is needed. Some of the folks who commented disagreed, so that one isn't over. And Badger Mountain, that's a solar project up in Douglas County. It's been paused for a while and the developer just asked for another full year. The reason is telling. They're waiting on Bonneville to build out transmission, and that timeline has been slipping by years. It's something we've noticed across a couple of different projects that have become here through the gorge. A utilities commissioner called that a challenging fact to hear, and it's becoming a pattern. The grid can't keep up, so approved projects sit and wait. This is a conflict that is being seen across the United States, and is a major barrier to some of our decarbonization goals and trying to move the grid over to renewables. It's called the interconnection queue, and it's something I'm really looking forward to digging into the history of in another episode, as it has really big impacts across the United States, but also in the last episode where we talked about how the Pacific Northwest might be nine gigawatts short on power capacity by 2030. It's the kind of thing that doesn't really make headlines, but it quietly decides which of these projects will ever actually get built and how it might impact the experience of how much electricity we need as a community and whether it's there when we need it most. So, what's next? There'll be again, as we said before, no FSEC meeting in August. The next one's in September. And here's the one to circle. That Cascade Renewable Transmission Land Use Comet Period is open right now through August 26th. That's the one Gorge residents will most want to catch. There's also a Badger Mountain comet period opening later this month, and a window on Carriger Solar's cleanup plan around the end of August. You can read the full written dispatch, as always, with every figure and link over at schemania dispatch.com. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, home of the Schemania Dispatch and the Click of Tattler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and to stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to schemania dispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash opengorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. Enjoy this beautiful summer, and we'll talk to you next time.