☀️ Carriger Solar Delays and CRT Updates - EFSEC March 2026

This newsletter now has an audio edition.

🏛 March 18, 2026 Meeting

The Body: Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC)

The Bottom Line: The Cascade Renewable Transmission (CRT) project is inching toward its formal environmental review phase as the state untangles complex overlapping jurisdictions in the Columbia River Gorge, while a new interactive mapping tool promises to demystify how these massive lines are routed.

The Vibe: Highly technical and cautiously deliberate. The council is heavily focused on ensuring robust tribal consultation and meticulously documenting procedures to avoid future legal pitfalls.

Executive Summary:

🔎 What Changed

• Transmission Map Live: The eProgrammatic digital interface and GIS route analysis tool, designed to map sensitive environmental resources for transmission projects, is now live for public use.
• Tribal Consultation Law: Substitute House Bill (SHB) 2496 passed the state legislature, allowing the full EFSEC council to meet with tribal councils without triggering Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) violations.
• New Council Members: Kate Dean (Department of Natural Resources) and Jennifer Sinescu (City of Camas) were formally introduced to the council.

⚠ What Escalated

• Carriger Solar Delays: Ongoing judicial review petitioned by the Yakama Nation has slowed the developer's progress on pre-construction plans in Klickitat County.
• Jurisdictional Complexity: Figuring out exactly which local Gorge governments get a seat at the table for CRT is proving complicated, with Clark County and North Bonneville representation still pending.

🧭 What’s Next

• CRT Tribal Outreach: EFSEC is sending formal government-to-government consultation letters to multiple tribal nations regarding the CRT project.
• Agency Coordination: EFSEC is drafting an interlocal agreement with Skamania County and the Columbia River Gorge Commission to clarify roles for CRT permitting.
• Rulemaking: Draft language for updated pre-application and site restoration rules could go before the council for approval by mid-April or May.

---

⚡ Cascade Renewable Transmission (CRT): Navigating the Gorge

• EFSEC is currently reviewing CRT's application to ensure it has enough information to kick off the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) review phase.
• Staff are actively trying to align the state SEPA process with the federal NEPA process led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
• EFSEC is developing an "interlocal agreement" with Skamania County and the Columbia River Gorge Commission to figure out how the National Scenic Area rules apply.
• Formal consultation letters are being prepared for the Yakama Nation, Warm Springs, Nez Perce, Umatilla, CRITFC, and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

The CRT project is exposing the structural friction between statewide energy mandates and highly localized, federally protected land-use rules. Because the proposed line cuts through the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, EFSEC cannot override local zoning as it typically might. The development of an interlocal agreement is a crucial administrative hurdle; it essentially dictates who has the final say over protecting the Gorge's viewshed and cultural resources. Furthermore, the slow rollout of council seats for small municipalities like North Bonneville highlights the logistical hassle of siting a 100-mile corridor across a patchwork of local authorities.

☀️ Carriger Solar: Stalled by Litigation

• In December 2025, the Yakama Nation filed a petition for judicial review against the council and the Governor's approval of the Klickitat County solar site.
• The litigation has effectively bottlenecked the developer’s ability to submit required pre-construction plans.
• The state is currently sealing confidential records and preparing to transmit the agency record to the Thurston County Superior Court.

Carriger Solar serves as a real-time case study in why the front-end permitting process is only half the battle. Even with the Governor's signature, unresolved tribal concerns regarding Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) can trigger judicial reviews that grind development to a halt. This structural reality is exactly why EFSEC is putting so much emphasis on the new tribal consultation bill (SHB 2496) trying to get these conversations happening directly with decision-makers long before a project ends up in Thurston County Superior Court.

⚡ The Big Picture: What is Carriger Solar?

• Carriger Solar is a proposed 160-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic electric generating facility paired with a 63-MW battery energy storage system (BESS).
• The project footprint covers 2,108 acres of privately owned land in unincorporated Klickitat County, approximately two miles west of Goldendale.

For the state, Carriger Solar is a crucial piece of the clean energy transition. The developers are under immense pressure to begin construction by July 2026 to qualify for vital federal tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, utility-scale solar requires massive amounts of contiguous land. In the Columbia River Gorge region, "empty" land is rarely actually empty, it is frequently layered with historical, ecological, and cultural significance.

⚖️ The Legal Friction: Why is it Stalled?

• Despite state approval , the Yakama Nation filed a lawsuit to halt the project, arguing it encroaches on essential food and medicine harvesting grounds.
• The legal challenge revolves around the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) and the mitigation of impacts on Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs).
• The lawsuit is currently being moved to the Thurston County Superior Court , effectively pausing major pre-construction momentum.

The friction here is deeply structural. On one side, there is a developer racing against a federal tax credit clock; on the other, a sovereign nation utilizing the judicial system to enforce treaty rights and environmental law.

To understand the broader political context, including the timeline pressures and the historical significance of the land to the Yakama Nation, the Capital Press published a comprehensive overview of the conflict when the project was first approved.

If you want to look under the hood at the exact legal arguments, the core dispute is detailed in EFSEC Resolution No. 360. In this document, the Yakama Nation argues that EFSEC violated SEPA by failing to require the developer to secure a concrete water supply prior to approval, and that the state's proposed mitigation efforts for disrupting Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) were legally insufficient.

While Carriger Solar is located in Klickitat County, the mechanics of this dispute matter to Skamania County and the rest of the Gorge as well. It highlights the absolute necessity of early, meaningful government-to-government (G2G) consultation. When tribal concerns regarding cultural resources and environmental impacts are not resolved during the initial planning phases, they inevitably lead to complex, expensive, and project-halting litigation on the back end. This reality is exactly why the state legislature just passed SHB 2496, to allow the full EFSEC council to meet directly with tribal councils earlier in the process without violating open meeting laws.

🗺️ The "TurboTax" of Environmental Impact

• EFSEC debuted its "eProgrammatic" tool, a digital interface for the statewide Transmission Programmatic EIS.
• The tool features an interactive GIS map that allows developers and the public to draw a hypothetical transmission route and instantly see what sensitive resources (military airspace, prime farmland, wetlands) it intersects.
• Councilmember Brian Rybarik dubbed it the "TurboTax of an EIS" for its checklist-style approach to assessing environmental impacts.

This tool represents a massive leap in transparency for public infrastructure projects. Historically, assessing a transmission route required digging through hundreds of pages of dense technical PDFs. By digitizing this data into a point-and-click map, EFSEC is lowering the barrier to entry for civic participation. For Gorge residents tracking projects like CRT, this means you can theoretically look at the exact routing layers the developers and the state are looking at, making it much easier for the public to ensure transparency and accountability, but also partnership in overcoming geographic and bureaucratic hurdles.

📝 Editor's Note:

As open data fans we applaud the launch of this Programmatic EIS tool, and its accessibility to the public by design. Based on 2025 reports, Washington ranks last in the nation for renewable energy growth due to regulatory bottlenecks and slow infrastructure development. In reporting on these public processes, the central theme in many public comments seems to shake out to, "Can't you just put it somewhere else?" This tool may help clarify the "put it somewhere else" challenges for agencies and companies in siting energy projects, especially for renewables where contiguous plots of land are required. We see time and again that open data helps facilitate deeper and more meaningful public-private benefit conversations, allowing all of us to more equally participate in finding (sometimes literal) pathways to make renewable energy infrastructure viable in our state.

⚠️ Broader Context - The EFSEC / Gorge Commission Overlap:

When a developer uses EFSEC, the state council essentially preempts local county permitting. However, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is governed by a federal act managed by a bi-state commission. EFSEC's authority to override the Gorge Commission is legally murky, which is why both entities are currently negotiating an "interlocal agreement" to avoid a jurisdictional turf war over projects like CRT.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• SEPA / NEPA: The State Environmental Policy Act (WA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (Federal). These are the laws that require massive "Environmental Impact Statements" (EIS) before a project is built.
• OPMA: Open Public Meetings Act. The Washington law that requires government boards to deliberate in public.
• G2G Consultation: Government-to-Government consultation. The formal legal process by which the state or federal government must consult with sovereign Native American Tribes regarding impacts on their treaty rights and cultural resources.

---

How to Join & Learn More:

• Access the new eProgrammatic Transmission Tool at efsec.wa.gov (Search "Programmatic" or navigate to Studies and Reports).
• Find full agendas, packets, and meeting recordings on the EFSEC Meetings Page.