The developers behind a $1.5 billion project to bury a 100-mile-long transmission line under the Columbia River and their opponents are preparing to take the battle to a series of public meeting this week.
The first meeting was set to be held 5-8 p.m. Monday at the Black Pearl on the Columbia event space in Washougal, after The Daily News deadline. Skamania and Klickitat counties will also have meetings on the following days. All can be attended remotely.
The Cascade Renewable Transmission project aims to beef up power transmission between where electricity is generated east of the Cascades and where it’s consumed, which is in population centers along the Interstate 5 corridor.
It would also move power past transmission bottlenecks in Portland to an important north-south high-voltage transmission route, and to data centers on the city’s west side.
The project submitted a 1,421-page permit application to Washington’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council in October.
“The situation is growing worse by the day in terms of available transmission capacity,” said Chris Hocker, the project’s lead for PowerBridge, which runs the project.
Hocker said the project — and other transmission infrastructure — is desperately needed right now. That may be the only part of the project nearly everyone agrees on.
But environmental and Native rights groups oppose the project because of the harm it stands to cause to the river’s struggling ecology and long-neglected treaty-reserved rights for Native nations around the Columbia River Basin.
Before the recent application, opposition groups had expressed frustrations with how little concrete details the project had provided to the public. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to a similar conclusion earlier this year when it said the project’s federal permitting application didn’t have enough information.
But lawyers and technical experts for the opposition groups have spent the past month scrambling to review the giant application, said Julie Carter, a lawyer and longtime policy analyst for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fishing Commission.
“You’re digging in this stressed river that supports the treaty-reserved resources of the tribes, so we’re going to be on the defensive immediately,” Carter said. “This river has been impacted so much by so many energy developments over the last century plus.”
Studies have found hydropower dams have been the main driver of the Columbia’s increasingly hot temperatures and salmon’s broader struggles to remain in the river.
Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead returns were between 10 million and 18 million fish before the hydropower system. Recently, they’ve numbered about 2.3 million.
Wild fish, in particular, have suffered. Most wild Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead runs are less than 5 percent of their pre-1850s levels, a 2022 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report found.
Currently, 13 Columbia Basin runs are under Endangered Species Act protections.
Carter said she also worries in particular about lamprey, a species Native nations in the Columbia Basin have worked hard to save. So little is known about lamprey right now that the project could dig its channel right into the middle of their migration route.
While Carter said the group still had a way to go in reviewing the application last week, one thing caught their attention right off the bat.
“The proponent attached our tribal energy vision,” she said, “and wrote a section … that basically asserts that their project meets all the recommendations and goals and objectives of the tribal energy vision — and we are unhappy about that because that is not true.”
Hocker said Oregon had asked the company to address the tribal fishing commission’s vision, and the company is trying to include the same information across all permits.
“The only way the agencies are going to be able to work together is if they all understand the project on the same basis,” he added.
Hocker said he intends to be at the meetings this week, so proponents, opponents and anyone with questions can hear more.
Hocker said he expects the Army Corps will soon announce that the project will require an environmental impact statement, an intensive process.
The project will need the Corps’ approval. And because the project lies between Oregon and Washington, it will also need permitting from both states.
But the project is in no rush. Earlier this year, it turned down expedited federal approval from the Trump administration, in part, to avoid drawing the ire of the two blue states.
