☢️ The Nuclear Plant Wants Power, & Skamania Wants Answers - EFSEC July '26

Enjoy the audio edition on Buzzsprout, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

🏛 July 2026 EFSEC Round-Up

Agencies Covered: Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC). Two meetings this month: a special meeting on July 7 (site tours of the Goose Prairie and Ostrea solar facilities) and the monthly Council meeting on July 15, held hybrid in Lacey.

The Bottom Line: EFSEC seated a new executive director, signed off on two corporate ownership transfers without a single public comment, and told a Skamania County councilmember plainly that the underwater power line proposed for the Columbia will not go through county permitting at all. There is no August meeting, but the public comment window on that power line's land use is open right now, through August 26.

The Vibe: Transitional and unusually candid. A director on day two and a half, an outgoing interim taking a well-earned lap, and two moments where the limits of local control got said out loud instead of buried in a packet.

🔎 What Changed

• Marco Lowe is EFSEC's new executive director. He was introduced on July 15 and told the Council he was on "day 2.5," which puts his start around July 13. Dave Walker, who has run the agency on an interim basis, gave his last director update.
• Two ownership transfers approved, both unopposed. Council Order No. 363 moves the Columbia Solar projects from Greenbacker to Altus Power. Council Order No. 364 approves a change in the upstream owners of Goose Prairie Solar. Both orders record that no public comments were submitted.
• Cascade Renewable Transmission now costs EFSEC as much as Horse Heaven. CRT rose a point to 9 percent of the agency's non-direct cost allocation for the quarter starting July 1, tying the sprawling Benton County wind project and trailing only the Richland nuclear plant.
• Carriger Solar's first cleanup plans arrived. EFSEC received three draft pre-construction plans for the Klickitat County project on June 23, including the one that decides who pays to take the site apart someday.
• Horse Heaven's final layout is set: 116 turbines instead of 147, but the taller design, up to 671 feet at the blade tip. EFSEC staff concluded no further environmental review is needed.
• Resolution No. 362 honored departing councilmember Elizabeth Osborne, after the Council amended it twice on the floor to fix errors in its own drafted text.

⚠ What Escalated

• "No separate locally issued permits or approvals." Asked directly whether the CRT line goes through any Skamania County process, EFSEC staff said local requirements get absorbed into the state process. Local zoning conditions can survive, but only if the Council writes them into a state site certificate.
• Bonneville's transmission delays are now moving projects. The developer behind Badger Mountain Solar asked for another year of pause, saying a Bonneville Power Administration transmission path it depends on slipped by years. A utilities commissioner called that "a challenging fact to hear."
• Ostrea Solar is still not formally operational, two months after its operator described commercial operation on the record. The typed packets say otherwise, and we got this wrong in June. See the correction below.

🧭 What's Next

• There is no regular EFSEC meeting in August. August 19 becomes staff training instead. The next regular meeting is in September.
• Open now, July 27 to August 26: a public comment period on CRT's updated land use materials, per EFSEC's project page, ahead of the Council's land use consistency determination. This is the Gorge comment window to catch.
• Late July: a 30-day public comment period opens on the Badger Mountain extension request, with the Council taking it up in September.
• Week of August 24: a 14-day comment period is expected to open on Carriger Solar's Initial Site Restoration Plan, which the Council must approve.

---

Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council

⚡ The Gorge's Power Line, and What "Local Permitting" Actually Means

The Cascade Renewable Transmission project is the one EFSEC item that touches Gorge ground directly. If you need the full backstory, our special report on the underwater power line lays out the route and the timeline.

Here is what the July packet says the project is: a 400 kilovolt, 1,100 megawatt high-voltage direct current line running mostly in the bed of the Columbia River, connecting Bonneville's Big Eddy substation near The Dalles to Portland General Electric's Harborton substation in Portland. About 40.2 route miles sit in Washington, crossing Skamania, Klickitat and Clark counties, plus roughly 7.6 miles where the cable leaves the river and runs buried overland, mostly in road right-of-way, to get around the Bonneville Locks and Dam.

Siting specialist Maria Belkina told the Council that staff have worked through the applicant's answers to their first data request, that the applicant supplied expanded jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction land use information, and that staff now think the record holds enough land use detail to move to the next stage. They do not plan another land use data request. Before the Council makes its land use consistency determination, EFSEC said it would open an additional public comment period focused specifically on the updated land use materials. Per EFSEC's project page, that period is now open, running July 27 to August 26, 2026.

Staff also walked the upland portion of the route with the Department of Ecology and the applicant's wetland specialists, reviewing 19 wetlands, and are working through Ecology's technical comments. Coordination continues with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Oregon Department of Energy on lining up the federal and state environmental reviews.

Then the meeting produced its most useful exchange for anyone who lives along the route. Councilmember Asa Leckie, who represents Skamania County on this project, asked whether there is a local permitting process running alongside the state one. "My concern is that this touches land in Skamania County," he said, "and, you know, as far as I know there's no local process yet on how to do a project like this."

EFSEC's Amy Hafkemeyer answered without hedging. Local requirements, she said, "would be reviewed and functionally absorbed by the [EFSEC] process." Grading permits, building permits, all of it gets wrapped in. "There's no separate locally issued permits or approvals." Any conditions tied to local zoning would instead be identified and written into a draft site certification agreement and enforced through that.

State energy siting preemption is not new law, but it is rarely stated this cleanly in a public meeting, and it answers a question Gorge residents keep asking in the wrong room. If you want conditions on how this line crosses Skamania County, the county courthouse is not where that gets decided. The leverage point is EFSEC's own record: the land use consistency determination ahead, and the comment period that precedes it, which EFSEC's project page shows is open now through August 26. That is a different comment period from the SEPA scoping round that closed June 1 with 46 comments, which we covered in June's edition. Chair Beckett also said CRT will move higher on future agendas out of respect for the local project councilmembers, who have been sitting through two hours of other business to get to their item.

One process note worth flagging. On July 7, EFSEC held a government-to-government consultation with the Yakama Nation Tribal Council on this project, the first use of the new full-council consultation authority that took effect June 11. Councilmember Kate Dean asked whether the Council can discuss what happened there, given that the Yakama Nation went into executive session. Chair Beckett said its ability to do so is limited, because EFSEC itself meets in public. So the substance of the first consultation of its kind will largely stay in the room.

☀️ Carriger Solar: the Cleanup Plan Reaches Public Comment

Carriger Solar is a proposed 160 megawatt solar project with 63 megawatts of battery storage on 2,108 acres of private land in unincorporated Klickitat County, about two miles west of Goldendale. Its permit fight has been running for a while; we covered the judicial review in March.

Siting specialist Joanne Snarski reported that EFSEC received three draft pre-construction plans on June 23: vegetation and weed management, habitat restoration and mitigation, and the Initial Site Restoration Plan. The first two are with the Department of Fish and Wildlife. The restoration plan went to the Yakama Nation for input, as the site certification agreement requires, and will also go to EFSEC's consultants.

That third plan is the one to watch. Under state rule, the Initial Site Restoration Plan has to come back to the Council for approval, and it is the document that identifies the major environmental and public health issues at end of life and, critically, sets aside the money to deal with them. Staff expect to open a 14-day public comment period the week of August 24.

Separately, the newly recovered June minutes settle a detail that had been unclear in our archive: the Carriger judicial review record is being transferred to Thurston County Superior Court, and the developer and the Yakama Nation have signaled they want the case stayed while they pursue settlement talks.

🔄 Two Ownership Transfers, Approved Without a Public Word

Both of July's votes were corporate handovers, and both passed with no public comment on the record.

• Columbia Solar (Council Order No. 363). Three solar facilities in Kittitas County, named Penstemon, Camas and Urtica, moved from Greenbacker Renewable Energy Corporation to Altus Power, LLC. The sale actually closed on December 17, 2025; this was the state catching up to it. Councilmember Nate Pamplin moved it, Kate Dean seconded.
• Goose Prairie Solar (Council Order No. 364). An 80 megawatt solar facility in Yakima County, operating since December 2024. Nothing about the project changes. What changes is who owns the owner: Mustang Yieldco Acquirer LLC, an investment platform jointly held by British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, Norges Bank Investment Management, and Brookfield Infrastructure Income Fund. Brookfield stays on running the place. Councilmember Brian Rybarik moved it.

Rybarik used the moment to make two points on the record. On the legal mechanics, he asked counsel why this order amends the certificates rather than cancelling and reissuing them, as some older transfer orders did. Assistant Attorney General Jon Thompson said the rules treat transfer as an amendment, and that here the certificate holders are not changing at all, only the controlling parent. On the merits, Rybarik said he found the June informational hearing genuinely useful, and that the incoming owners "showed that they have the requisite financial and technical capabilities to step into the issues" even if they had not worked in Washington before.

Both orders came out of hearings held in June that drew zero public comment, and the votes themselves took about four minutes combined. This kind of promptness is what the process looks like when it works as designed. But it is worth noticing that the pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles now sitting behind Washington's solar fleet arrive through a docket most people never see. Norges Bank Investment Management manages Norway's sovereign wealth fund, built on that country's oil revenue. It is now, at one remove, a part-owner of a solar farm in Yakima County, and the public's window to say anything about that was a June hearing announced in an EFSEC notice.

🔥 Ostrea Solar: What Actually Burned, and a Correction

First, the correction. In June we reported that Ostrea Solar is generating commercially. The typed record does not support that. EFSEC's packets for both the June and July reporting periods list the facility's status as "Construction" and state under operations that it is "Not yet operational." The liability waiver EFSEC circulated for the July 7 site tour also describes the site as under ongoing construction. What the operator said on the recording was that Bonneville had authorized commercial operation and that they had been operating since about April, with his own hedge, "I think." Those are different claims, and we should have carried the state's formal status rather than the operator's description. We regret the error.

On the fire, the investigation is now closed and the packet is specific. A tracker assembly was not fully connected to its supporting pile and came loose. The loose equipment pinched a portion of DC cable, exposed the conductor, and a spark fell into the brush below and started a fire. A full visual inspection followed, all equipment in the affected area was tested before the site was re-energized, and a single row needed DC cable and one solar panel replaced. That work finished June 24, the damaged panel was recycled, and the facility came back online.

Because of the fire, Cypress Creek asked EFSEC on June 16 for permission to cut vegetation ahead of the July 31 restricted date its own weed management plan imposes. EFSEC granted a conditional variance on June 30. Mowing crews are out now, with a water truck following the mowers and crews walking ahead to clear rocks that could throw a spark.

Two housekeeping items appear in the packet under complaints and violations: sediment building up in various rock check dams, and general cleanup needed in the laydown yards.

🔎 Editor's technical note: Corrections like the one above are part of the fun process of maintaining our own public meetings database of both recording transcripts and the written record. We find sometimes that they don't always line up, not for any malicious reason but because these are active, complex processes. Our database automatically flags these conflicts as "open cases." It can be very satisfying to get updates in later meetings or packets that help us close and/or correct them. We hope Benoit Blanc would be proud.

☢️ Columbia Generating Station Wants to Make More Power

This was the meeting's longest item and its first real briefing on the state's only nuclear plant in many years. Chair Beckett described it as the first substantive Columbia Generating Station discussion at EFSEC in, if not fifty years, at least a long while.

Rick Garcia, licensing supervisor at Energy Northwest, walked the Council through an "extended power uprate," which is regulator language for squeezing more electricity out of an existing reactor. The numbers below come from the typed slide deck in the packet.

• The plant is a General Electric boiling water reactor near Richland, licensed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 1983 and currently licensed through December 2043, with a possible extension to 2063. Its state site certification agreement dates to May 17, 1972.
• It has been uprated twice already: a stretch uprate in 1994 and a smaller measurement adjustment in 2017. It now runs at 106.7 percent of its original licensed thermal power.
• The new project targets 120 percent of original licensed power by 2031, taking gross generating capacity from 1,207 megawatts to roughly 1,380 megawatts.
• Physical work is spread across three refueling outages, in 2027, 2029 and 2031, with the extra power coming online on restart from the 2031 outage.
• Federal approval runs from the second quarter of 2028 to the fourth quarter of 2030. EFSEC's own approval timeline is listed in the deck as "TBD."
• Preliminary effects on the state site certificate: more thermal output, slight increases in wastewater discharge and blowdown temperature (both said to stay inside the existing water quality permit), and a slight increase in how much Columbia River water the plant draws.

The two questions the deck did not answer

Councilmember Kate Dean asked about water, and about tribal consultation, and the answers were noticeably thinner than the engineering.

On water, Garcia said preliminary studies put the increase in river withdrawal at roughly 15,000 to 17,000 gallons per minute, and that Energy Northwest has started talking to the Department of Ecology about its future water needs at the agency level rather than project by project, because it also has a new nuclear initiative in development. Beckett endorsed that framing and said water "is obviously as critical and increasingly challenged in terms of its availability," and that it "will certainly be a priority of this council."

On tribal consultation, nobody could describe a project-specific process. Bonneville is handling consultation for the federal environmental review; Energy Northwest has internal procedures, "used to have a tribal liaison," and the project manager has done what was described as socialization of the concept. Beckett said that while Energy Northwest has broad engagement channels generally, project-specific consultation "is a key step" and should be made a priority.

Garcia also flagged that the federal ground is shifting underneath the project. Draft changes to how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handles environmental reviews "just hit the street within the past week," he said, with a large volume of federal regulatory change expected to land by the end of 2026. Beckett's read was that EFSEC and Energy Northwest both still answer to the state environmental policy act whatever happens federally, and that the job is to "create a bridge between those two worlds, knowing there might be a little more distance than perhaps in an earlier decade."

🌬 Horse Heaven: Fewer Turbines, Taller Ones, and One New View

Horse Heaven is not a Gorge project, it sits in Benton County near the Tri-Cities, but it is the biggest thing on EFSEC's docket and its processes set precedent for how projects progress in our area. On June 26 the agency issued an addendum to the project's 2023 environmental impact statement covering the developer's final layout, with a comment period that closed July 9. The figures here come from the addendum and staff memo EFSEC posted, not the meeting recording.

The certificate holder, Scout Clean Energy, made one trade worth understanding. It cut the number of turbines it will build from 147 to 116, out of a permitted maximum of 222, but committed to the taller of the two designs the impact statement studied, at up to 671 feet at the blade tip. It also changed a planned underground crossing of Interstate 82 into an overhead one, citing "technical challenges" with going under the freeway.

One new impact, and a memo 

Fewer turbines means less of almost everything, and EFSEC's staff memo works through fifteen categories finding no net increase in nearly all of them. The lone exception is that freeway crossing: staff wrote the overhead line "would introduce a new adverse visual impact to motorists travelling I-82 that was not analyzed in the Final EIS," then judged it not significant because a nearby overpass masks the view and another line already crosses there. Director of Siting and Compliance Amí Hafkemeyer signed the recommendation that no supplemental review is needed.

The timing is the part to notice. That recommendation is dated June 26, the same day the comment window opened. EFSEC's docket now lists 109 comment filings; staff told the Council on July 15 they had received 107 and had not finished reviewing them. A common theme, per SEPA specialist Sean Greene, was that committing to the taller turbines means building bigger than what was studied. Staff's answer is that the impact statement assessed both turbine options and the site certificate approved both, so picking one is not a new impact. No Council vote attaches to the addendum; the next decision that weighs it is approval of the final construction plans, not expected soon.

🌵 Badger Mountain: When the Grid Isn't Ready, the Project Waits

Badger Mountain Solar is a proposed 200 megawatt solar project with optional battery storage on roughly 2,274 acres in Douglas County, east of East Wenatchee. It has been paused since June 2024, and the Council put it on formal hold for twelve months in August 2025.

About a week before the July meeting, the developer asked for another twelve-month extension and continued pause, running through July 31, 2027. The stated reason is transmission: the company needs time to evaluate alternatives because Bonneville has delayed the grid expansion the project counts on.

Staff will post the request for a 30-day public comment period and bring it to the Council in September. If granted, the project stays on the books as active while nobody works on it, and a fresh public informational meeting would be held whenever the applicant restarts. Because the project already carries a determination of land use inconsistency, staff do not expect the Council would need to revisit that.

Beckett noted for the record that the Yakama Nation and the Colville tribes have stated concerns about the project. Rybarik, who sits on the state utilities commission, put his own reaction on the record: it is "challenging to hear and to see a letter that says that the BPA process is getting moved out for years," and he framed it as a problem facing the state broadly rather than this project alone.

🏢 A New Director, No August Meeting, and Who Pays for EFSEC

Marco Lowe was introduced as executive director. He told the Council he grew up in Thurston County, left state government in late 1999, and spent the last decade in energy, and that what he took from it was that "the 21st century will belong to energy." Beckett thanked staff, and Dave Walker and Nabila Gomes specifically, for carrying the recruitment.

Walker, on his way out, delivered three items. EFSEC's 2026 to 2028 strategic plan is now posted publicly, reachable from the agency website under About EFSEC, then History and Mission, about halfway down the page. It took roughly nine months to produce. And there will be no Council meeting in August: the August 19 date becomes offsite staff development and training. Councilmember Blake Nelson thanked him, calling him "a servant leader, and that's about the highest compliment I can give anybody who works at the state."

Walker also presented the non-direct cost allocation for the quarter beginning July 1, which is essentially the map of where EFSEC's attention goes. Columbia Generating Station takes 20 percent. Horse Heaven and Cascade Renewable Transmission tie at 9 percent each, with Horse Heaven down a point and CRT up a point. Carriger Solar sits at 6 percent.

For Gorge readers, that is the number worth holding onto: the two projects that touch Skamania and Klickitat counties, CRT and Carriger, together account for 15 percent of EFSEC's non-direct costs this quarter.

The Council also adopted Resolution No. 362 honoring Elizabeth Osborne, who was appointed by the Department of Commerce in August 2023 and served until May 27, 2026. The resolution as drafted said she had served seven years and was dated August 15, 2026. The Council amended both on the floor, to two years and ten months and to July 15. Osborne used her closing remarks to flag that the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's Ninth Power Plan is expected out within about a month for a long public comment period, and asked for engagement on it.

---

⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

• State siting preempts local permitting, by design. Washington's energy facility siting law routes qualifying projects through EFSEC instead of through city and county permit counters. That is the whole point of the statute: one process rather than dozens. The practical consequence for a Gorge landowner is that the comment period that matters is a state one, and the deadline is set in Olympia.
• Local governments do get a seat, but a narrow one. Counties and cities affected by a project get project-specific councilmembers on EFSEC, which is why Skamania County, Stevenson, North Bonneville, Klickitat County, Clark County and Camas all have voices on the CRT docket. Those members vote on their project, not on the others.
• A determination of land use inconsistency is not a rejection. Badger Mountain has carried one since 2022 and remains an active application. Under the statute, an inconsistency finding sends the question up rather than killing it, and the Council can still recommend approval.
• Ownership churn is now routine in this docket. Three of this month's items involved a corporate parent changing hands. The state's review in those cases is narrow by rule: it asks whether the new owner is organizationally, financially, managerially and technically capable of meeting the existing conditions, not whether the project should have been approved.
• Bonneville's queue is becoming a siting constraint. Two separate projects this month cited BPA timelines, one of them citing a delay of years. Grid interconnection is emerging as the bottleneck that decides which approved projects actually get built and when.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• SCA (Site Certification Agreement): the state contract that lets an energy facility exist and sets every condition it must meet. Amending it is how EFSEC changes the rules for a project.
• Land use consistency determination: EFSEC's formal finding on whether a proposed project squares with local zoning. It is the step where county land use rules get their hearing, and for CRT it follows the comment period now open through August 26.
• Initial Site Restoration Plan: the plan for taking a project apart at the end of its life, including proof that money has been set aside to do it. The Council must approve it.
• Non-direct cost allocation: how EFSEC divides its overhead among the projects it regulates, based on where staff time actually went. A rough proxy for which projects are consuming the agency.
• Extended power uprate: federal regulator language for modifying an existing reactor to produce more than 7 percent additional power. Columbia is seeking one.
• Upstream indirect transfer of control: the company holding the permit stays exactly the same; the company that owns that company changes. Still requires Council approval.
• BMPs (Best Management Practices): the erosion and runoff controls required on a construction site, like silt fencing and straw matting.
• NPDES permit: the federal-state water pollution permit governing what a facility may discharge.

📅 How to Join & Learn More

• There is no regular EFSEC Council meeting in August 2026. The next regular meeting is in September; watch the EFSEC calendar for the date.
• EFSEC meetings are hybrid, held at 621 Woodland Square Loop SE, Lacey, with a call-in option. Agendas, packets and past meeting materials: efsec.wa.gov
• Project pages, including comment opportunities: Cascade Renewable Transmission, Goose Prairie Solar, Ostrea Solar
• Comment periods to watch: CRT's updated land use materials, open now through August 26; the Badger Mountain extension (30 days, opening late July); and Carriger Solar's Initial Site Restoration Plan (14 days, expected the week of August 24).
• General questions to EFSEC: efsec@efsec.wa.gov