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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with High Country News. 

When Yakama Nation leaders learned in 2017 of a plan to tunnel through some of their ancestral land for a green energy development, they were caught off guard.

While the tribal nation had come out in favor of climate-friendly projects, this one appeared poised to damage Pushpum, a privately owned ridgeline overlooking the Columbia River in Washington. The nation holds treaty rights to gather traditional foods there, and tribal officials knew they had to stop the project.

Problems arose when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of permitting hydro energy projects, offered the Yakama Nation what tribal leaders considered an impossible choice: disclose confidential ceremonial, archaeological and cultural knowledge, or waive the right to consult on whether and how the site is developed.

This put the Yakama Nation in a bind. Disclosing exactly what made the land sacred risked revealing to outsiders what they treasured most about it. In the past, disclosure of information about everything from food to archaeological sites enabled non-Natives to loot or otherwise desecrate the land.

Even now, tribal leaders struggle to safely express what the Pushpum project threatens. “I don’t know how in-depth I can go,” said Elaine Harvey, a tribal member and former environmental coordinator for the tribal fisheries department, when asked about the foods and medicines that grow on the land.

“It provides for us,” echoed Yakama Nation Councilmember Jeremy Takala. “Sometimes we do get really protective.”

Although government agencies have sometimes taken significant steps to protect tribal confidentiality, that didn’t happen with the Pushpum proposal, known as the Goldendale Energy Storage Project. Tribal leaders repeatedly objected, telling the agency that if a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it — a position supported by state agency leaders and, new reporting shows, at least one other federal agency.

Nonetheless, after seven years, in February FERC moved the project forward without consulting with the Yakama Nation.

The process known as consultation is often fraught. Federal laws and agency rules require that tribes be able to weigh in on decisions that affect their treaty lands. But in practice, consultation procedures sometimes force tribes to reveal information that makes them more vulnerable, without offering any guaranteed benefit.

The risks of disclosure are not hypothetical: Looting and vandalism are common when information about Indigenous resources becomes public. One important mid-Columbia petroglyph, called Tsagaglalal, or She Who Watches, had to be removed from its original site because of vandalism. And recreational and commercial pickers have flooded one of Washington’s best huckleberry picking areas, called Indian Heaven Wilderness, pushing out Native families trying to stock up for the winter.

The Yakama Nation feared similar outcomes if it fully participated in FERC’s consultation process over the Goldendale development. But there are alternatives. The United Nations recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to affirmatively consent to development on their sacred lands. A similar model was included in state legislation in Washington three years ago, but Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed it.

The requirements of the consultation process are poorly defined, and state and federal agencies interpret them in a broad range of ways. In the case of Pushpum, critics say that has allowed FERC to overlook tribal concerns.

“They’re just being totally disregarded,” said Simone Anter, an attorney at the environmental nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper and a descendant of the Pascua Yaqui and Jicarilla Apache nations. “What FERC is doing is so blatantly, blatantly wrong.”

The Yakama Nation has been outspoken in its support for renewable energy development, including solar and small-scale hydro projects. But not at Pushpum; it’s sacred to the Kah-milt-pah people, one of the bands within the Yakama Nation, who still regularly use the site.

The proposal would transform this area into a facility intended to store renewable energy in a low-carbon way. Rye Development, a Florida-based company, submitted an application for permits for a “pumped hydro” system, where a pair of reservoirs connected by a tunnel store energy for future use.

FERC has offered few accommodations for the Yakama Nation on the Goldendale project.

FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller told High Country News and ProPublica in an email that “we will work to address the effects of proposed projects on Tribal rights and resources to the greatest extent we can, consistent with federal law and regulations. This is a pending matter before the Commission, so we cannot discuss the merits of this proceeding.”

“FERC legally doesn’t have to do very much here,” said Kevin Washburn, a dean of the University of Iowa College of Law, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and a former assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior. “Consultation is designed to open the door so tribes can get in the door to talk to decision-makers.” According to experts, the process can range from collaborative planning that addresses tribal concerns to a perfunctory discussion with minimal impacts, depending on the agency.

“This is the problem with consultation and its lack of teeth,” said Anter. “If the federal government is saying, ‘Hey, we consulted, check that box,’ who’s to say they didn’t?”

There’s another problem with consultation, too: Any discussions with a federal entity are subject to public disclosure. That’s good for government transparency, Washburn said, but it can make tribal nations even more vulnerable. “And it’s why tribes are right to be cautious in what they share with feds,” he said.

That’s an obstacle at Pushpum. Things became even harder there in August 2021, when FERC notified the Yakama Nation that federal consultation would be carried out not by the agency itself, but by the developer. The Yakama Nation pushed back, asserting its treaty rights to negotiate as a sovereign nation only with another nation, not with a private entity. FERC, however, insisted that designating a third party was “standard practice.” The National Historic Preservation Act, signed into law in 1966, says an agency “may authorize an applicant or group of applicants to initiate consultation,” but maintains that the federal agency is still “responsible for their government to government relationships with Indian tribes.”

The Yakama Nation also worried about commission rules that require anything the tribal nation says to FERC be shared with the developer. “It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories,” said Takala, the tribal councilmember. “We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Some say FERC could change that internal rule, since it isn’t required by law. “For them to cite their own regulations and be like, ‘Our hands are tied,’ is ridiculous,” Anter said. For months, FERC and the Yakama Nation went back and forth over the conditions under which the tribal government would share sensitive information, with the Yakama Nation repeatedly asking to share information only with FERC.

Ultimately, FERC proposed four ways the Yakama Nation could participate in consultation. In the eyes of tribal leaders, all these options either posed significant risks to the privacy of their information or rendered consultation meaningless.

The first three were laid out in a letter from Vince Yearick, director of FERC’s division of hydropower licensing, sent on Dec. 9, 2021. For option one, it suggested the tribal nation request nondisclosure agreements from anyone accessing sensitive information. Yearick did not specify whether FERC would be responsible for issuing or enforcing these NDAs.

Delano Saluskin, then-chair of the Yakama Nation, called this option “far from the requirements of NHPA or in line with the trust responsibility that the Federal Agency has to Yakama Nation,” citing FERC policies and National Historic Preservation Act law in a February 2022 letter to state and federal government officials requesting support. He added that it “describes a process that does not protect information that is sacred and sensitive from disclosure.”

Alternatively, FERC said, the Yakama Nation could simply redact any sensitive information from documents it filed. This option, however, would leave FERC in the dark about the details of what cultural resources the project would imperil. That would make it harder for FERC to require project adjustments or weigh the specific impacts in its decision about whether to permit construction.

Third, the Yakama Nation could withhold sensitive information altogether, which would present similar problems.

Lastly, in a June 2022 follow-up letter, the commission suggested that the Yakama Nation submit a document “with more details regarding the resources of concern” and a request that some of the information be treated as privileged or withheld from public disclosure.

Overall, Saluskin described FERC’s options as a “failure” to conduct legal consultation in good faith.

A federal agency similarly raised concerns: In May 2023, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which advises the president and the Congress on protecting historic properties across the country, wrote to FERC suggesting that it “provide the Tribes with opportunities to share information that will be kept confidential.” FERC’s rule regarding disclosure, the council said, could insulate the agency from meaningful consultation, “and as a result from any real understanding of the nature and significance of properties of religious and cultural significance for Tribes.”

The concerns over FERC’s engagement with the Yakama Nation are part of a wider discussion of whether and how the U.S. government should protect tribal privacy and cultural resources. Speaking at a tribal energy summit in Tacoma in June 2023, Allyson Brooks, Washington’s state historic preservation officer, said that even though the consent language was vetoed by the governor, state law for protecting confidentiality around tribal cultural properties is still stronger than federal law, which only protects confidentiality if a site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

In Washington, if a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK,’” Brooks declared. She said asking tribal nations to prove a site’s sacredness is like asking to see a photo of baby Jesus before accepting the sanctity of Christmas. “You don’t. You say ‘nice tree’ and take it at face value. When tribes say ‘X is sacred,’ you should take that at face value too.”

That approach is vital to the Yakama Nation, which recently saw a developer involved with a project proposed in nearby Benton County leak information that the nation believed was private.

The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm would be the biggest energy development of any kind in Washington state history. But the sprawling 72,000-acre project overlaps with nesting habitat for migratory ferruginous hawks, a raptor state-listed as endangered.

Court documents related to the permitting proceedings show that the Yakama Nation believed it had identified the locations of the ferruginous hawks’ nests as confidential, in part because the hawks are ceremonially important. In May 2023, the Yakama Nation requested a protective order from the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a state-level analog of FERC. The order, which the council issued, instructed all parties to sign a confidentiality agreement before accessing confidential information, similar to the nondisclosure agreements FERC proposed. If any party disclosed that information, they could be liable for damages.

But the order didn’t stop that information from getting out. In February 2024, the Seattle Times published a story on the Horse Heaven Hills wind farm, which included a map of ferruginous hawk nests — a map that was credited to Scout Clean Energy, the developer.

The Yakama Nation quickly filed a motion to enforce the protective order, alleging that Scout Clean Energy had transgressed by passing protected cultural information to the press.

The developer counter-filed, claiming that even if nest locations were a part of confidentiality discussion, the map itself was not, and that it was so imprecise that the critical details remained confidential. The council ultimately agreed.

Despite the risks, Washburn said that tribes should take any opportunity to share their stories with federal officials, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. “I wouldn’t necessarily encourage tribes to give their deepest, darkest secrets to a federal agency,” he said. “But I would encourage them to meet with FERC and try to give FERC a first-person account of why they think this is important.”

Not all experts agree. Brett Lee Shelton, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said FERC is out of step with other federal and state agencies. “It’s hard to believe that it’s anything but disingenuous, using that tactic,” he said. “It’s pretty well known by any agency officials who deal with Indian tribes that sometimes certain specifics about sacred places need to remain confidential.”

And for Bronsco Jim, a spiritual leader of the Kah-milt-pah people, sharing too many details is out of the question. Cultural specifics stay within the oral teachings of the longhouse, the site of the Kah-milt-pah spiritual community. Jim said he doesn’t even know how to translate all of the information into English. “We don’t write it, you won’t see it posted. You won’t see it in books. It’s our oral history. It’s sacred.”

In a push for green energy, one federal agency made tribes an offer they had to refuse is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This article was originally published by Crosscut.

As Washington state lawmakers and Gov. Jay Inslee put the final touches on a trio of budget deals this legislative session, they are set to make big new investments in projects to slow or adapt to climate change. Hundreds of millions of dollars will likely be used to electrify buses and some state ferries, and on the charging infrastructure for them.

Other dollars could be put toward restoring salmon habitat, accelerating clean-energy projects and helping ease the burdens of pollution on vulnerable communities that are disproportionately affected by carbon emissions.

This year’s deal-making comes after lawmakers and Inslee in 2021 approved Senate Bill 5126, which made Washington the second state, behind California, to adopt a carbon-cap-and-invest program.

Known as the Climate Commitment Act, the new law puts a price on carbon, and businesses that generate fewer emissions than the credits allowed for them are then able to sell those credits to other businesses that are more slowly reducing greenhouse gases. The law is expected to generate between $500 million and $1 billion annually in the coming years, according to the state Office of Financial Management, which can be put toward clean energy projects.

In March, the state Department of Ecology sold the first round of credits at an auction — which will take place four times a year — raising a total of $300 million. Over time, the total pool of carbon credits available is expected to be gradually ratcheted down. The hope is to get to net-zero emissions by 2050.

Now state lawmakers are disbursing the total projected carbon dollars across three new state budgets. That adds a new level of complexity for negotiations, according to House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma.

“That’s a big piece of work that we’ve never had to do before,” Jinkins said in a question-and-answer session with reporters. But “I don’t think there’s a lot of, like, disagreement about what we’re doing.”

Reuven Carlyle, a former Democratic state senator from Seattle, sponsored the legislation, and said he was purposely vague on how the money should be spent.

“My goal politically was to get the budget writers salivating with opportunity and anticipation about how to leverage those dollars for federal dollars and for private investment,” said Carlyle.

The new law has gotten a boost since it was signed because the federal Inflation Reduction Act included big investments in climate change that include matching federal funds, said Carlyle, who has since founded a start-up to help businesses hit climate goals.

He described it as “a third less expensive than anticipated the day the governor signed the bill.”

Negotiations

House and Senate Democrats — who hold majorities in the Legislature — and Inslee’s office are now negotiating a package to be distributed in the budgets being finalized before the April 23 scheduled end of the legislative session.

Figuring out the transportation budget may be easiest, since lawmakers last year announced they were dedicating a big chunk of Climate Commitment Act dollars to secure funding and passage for the 16-year transportation spending package, known as Move Ahead Washington, that passed last year. Legislators are putting other dollars into the new two-year capital-construction budget.

And then there’s the state operating budget, the main budget that funds the broad array of government services, from K-12 schools and the mental-health system to parks, prisons, wildfire response and more.

The various proposals for that new budget — expected to come in around $70 billion — include climate dollars to help local governments and tribes reduce the impact of climate change and pollution. Those plans would also fund clean-energy projects and job training.

In a news conference last week, Inslee called for lawmakers to make sure money was going into projects that could directly reduce carbon emissions.

“We want to make sure, first, that this money is used to tackle climate change,” Inslee said, adding: “Because there’s many things that are good projects in the state of Washington, but … we have made a commitment to Washingtonians to reduce our carbon pollution.”

Final budget agreements are likely to be released in the final days of the legislative session.

Republicans in Washington have broadly opposed the Climate Commitment Act and other clean-energy legislation, warning that among other things it could raise the prices for gas and housing for people already struggling to get by in Washington.

Though she voted against the bill in 2021, Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, successfully sponsored an amendment to the law that requires the state Department of Ecology to produce an annual report on climate spending. Those updates must detail the recipients of climate funds, along with the amount, the purpose and the ultimate use of those dollars, and if possible what verified impact they have had.

In an interview, Dye questioned how the Democratic majority is distributing the funds and whether a final deal will meet the law’s requirement that at least 35% of the investments go toward vulnerable communities that bear a disproportionate burden of the impacts of pollution.

“I tried to make sure that we put something in so that we know our policies are working or not,” said Dye, the ranking Republican on the House Environment & Energy Committee. But “there’s no performance metrics for the overburdened and vulnerable communities.”

Lawmakers should honor their commitments to those communities, said Dye. She also questioned other proposed uses of the climate dollars, criticizing proposals to spend big on Washington’s universities, as well as a project that would reshape Capitol Lake, the human-made body of water at the bottom edge of Puget Sound that the Capitol campus overlooks.

Legislators are meanwhile looking at other adjustments to the Climate Commitment Act. Just last week, Democratic Sens. Mark Mullet of Issaquah and Joe Nguyễn of White Center introduced a bill to ease the cost burdens of fuel on freight haulers and farmers moving agricultural products. Senate Bill 5766 has already been scheduled for both a hearing and a vote this week in the Senate Ways & Means Committee.

“As Washington works toward a green future, we must be mindful of the impacts that these transitions have on our communities,” said Nguyễn. “Our farmers are critical contributors to our economy, and they are being unfairly targeted by big oil companies. It was always our intention to exempt their fuel from the CCA guidelines, and this legislation affirms our commitment to them as we transition into a cleaner, greener economy.”

And Carlyle, the former senator who wrote the law, said elected officials may have to do more in the coming years to reckon with the fact that Washington’s hoped-for transition toward electrified vehicles and buildings will create new stresses on the energy grid.

He described it as “the dark underbelly of the issue that has not yet surfaced.”

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How Washington plans to spend money from the new carbon-cap law is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

It could be the next big thing in power plants. 

Or actually the next big little thing: small prefabricated nuclear reactors.

An Oregon company wants to provide a quick, flexible way to power the region by building modular nuclear units that can be built in a factory and then transported to the power-plant site for final assembly.

Not only would these new units be carbon-free — although not likely controversy-free — but they’re also less expensive to build than traditional nuclear power plants. 

Each modular unit would be a mini-reactor capable of generating 50 to 300 megawatts of energy. (One hundred megawatts could power 120,000 houses.) Small modular reactors are supposed to be designed so extra modules can be added as needed, with 12 modules being the theoretical maximum. This concept is supposed to lead to lower costs, faster construction times and more flexibility in tailoring a reactor complex to its customers’ needs.  

The nation’s first small modular reactors will likely show up in the Pacific Northwest, possibly in Idaho and Central Washington’s Grant County, with a target online date of roughly 2030.

Some U.S. and world leaders are pushing this new sort of nuclear reactor as a carbon-emissions-free measure to combat climate change.

The front runner in setting up a small modular reactor in the United States is NuScale Power of Corvallis, Oregon.

But its prominence has brought extra scrutiny. Does NuScale’s design create more radioactive waste than a conventional reactor? 

In August 2020, NuScale became the first, and so far only, small modular reactor developer to receive approval for its 60 MW design by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company plans to submit an improved follow-up version of that design to the commission this December. These design changes include having the proposed reactors produce 77 MW each. By comparison, the Columbia Generating Station reactor north of Richland generates 1,200 MW.

NuScale declined Crosscut’s request for in-person interviews, and discussed the venture solely through email.

There are roughly two dozen small modular reactor designs worldwide, about half of which originate in the United States. So far, the world has two functioning 150 MW reactors, both on a barge in the Russian Arctic Ocean port of Pevek. China expects to have one up and running by 2026. NuScale also hopes to deliver six small modular reactors to Romania by 2028.

The company has been pursuing two partnerships in the Northwest to build small modular reactor complexes in Idaho and Central Washington. The Idaho venture appears to be on track to open in 2030. Meanwhile, NuScale appears to be losing to a competitor in the Central Washington proposal. NuScale also hopes to deliver six small modular reactors to Romania by 2028. 

NuScale has partnered with the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) — a collection of 36 public utilities in Utah, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming — to build a six-reactor complex at the Idaho National Laboratory site next to Idaho Falls by 2030. Each reactor — whose core would be about 10 feet shorter than the Columbia Generating Station’s — would produce 77 MW for the complex’s total of 462 MW.

UAMPS’ customer base is too small to justify building a conventional 1,000-megawatt-plus reactor, said spokesman LaVarr Webb. Adding small modular reactors as needed fits UAMPS’ idea of expanding when demand for nuclear energy grows, he said. UAMPS is also trying to dramatically cut its carbon footprint, leading to this venture being dubbed the “Carbon-Free Power Project.”

Originally, the completion date was 2027; current plans are to install the first reactor in 2029 with the rest online by 2030. Construction is supposed to begin in 2026. Meanwhile, the original cost estimate climbed from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. Eight of the 36 utilities also decided to drop out of the project, Webb said.

“It is not as drastic as it sounds,” Webb said of the changes. He said some utilities dropped out because they did not foresee using the Idaho complex’s electricity when 2030 rolls around. And the increased costs and delays come from the construction plans becoming more detailed, according to NuScale representatives and Chuck Allen, spokesperson for the Grant County Public Utility District.

“This has been a very slow-developing industry,” said Chuck Johnson, program director of the Boston-based International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He followed NuScale over the past decade for the Oregon chapter of the nuclear watchdog Physicians for Social Responsibility. 

Meanwhile, the Grant County utility district has been seriously looking at developing small modular reactors with either NuScale or X-energy, a Rockville, Maryland-based company also in the modular reactor field. The  Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to approve X-energy’s design.

The Grant County utility district’s representatives looked both at sites within the county and at the never-completed Washington Public Power Supply System reactor site next to the Columbia Generating Station within the Hanford nuclear reservation. Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station, formerly the Washington Public Power Supply System before a 1980s bond default, stopped construction of two extra WPPSS reactors at Hanford. The infrastructure remains for something to be built alongside the two half-built reactors. 

While Grant County utility district officials thought X-energy’s and NuScale’s technologies looked promising, they found the X-energy design a better fit for the county, said Allen. X-energy’s basic design calls for four 80 MW small modular reactors to be developed into a 320 MW complex.

Despite looking at the old Energy Northwest (WPPSS) reactor site, Grant County utilities officials are leaning toward locating the project within the county at a site yet to be selected. Economics, proximity to customers and access to transmission lines factored into the Public Utility District’s decision to put the site within the county, Allen said.

X-energy and Bellevue-based TerraPower, which plans to build a new type of nuclear reactor in Wyoming, were awarded a combined $3.2 billion in federal money in 2020 to help develop their projects with goals of getting online by 2027. However, both basic designs still need NRC approval. The $3.2 billion depends on Congress appropriating the money in annual chunks.  

Meanwhile, a Stanford University study published in May raised questions about contamination from used nuclear fuel from those same reactors.

It looked at NuScale’s designs, as well as designs from two other companies submitted to the NRC. X-energy’s was not among them. The study picked NuScale’s design because it was the furthest along in the NRC’s reviews, said one of the study’s authors, Lindsay Krall, a former Stanford graduate fellow who now works with a nuclear fuel management company in Sweden. 

The Stanford study concluded that NuScale’s and the other two designs would produce greater volumes of radioactive wastes than conventional reactors, and that the used reactor fuel would be roughly 50% more radioactive.

In an interview, Krall also said the heightened radioactivity increases the chance that some of the decaying wastes in long-term storage will regain radioactivity, potentially achieving a “critical” condition. A criticality is an uncontrolled burst of radiation caused by substances with certain shapes and at certain levels of radioactivity coming close enough to spark that burst.

Johnson, of the anti-nuclear war physicians’ group, added that storing radioactive used fuel is a problem facing the entire nuclear industry, including small modular reactors. He also noted that NuScale has received federal aid to get the Idaho project online, arguing that is a sign of financial weakness. He argued that NuScale needs a large number of customers to financially break even, saying only UAMPS and Romania have surfaced as customers. He also argued that spreading small modular reactors to small nations will increase the availability of nuclear material to be stolen and used in atomic and “dirty” bombs.

NuScale disagrees with the Stanford study’s conclusions. In an email to Crosscut, it argued that the company’s design uses conventional nuclear fuel used in typical reactors. “The [Stanford] paper uses outdated design information for the energy capacity of the NuScale fuel design and wrong assumptions for the material used in the reactor reflector, and on burn-up of the fuel,“ a NuScale email said.

The email said a small modular reactor’s radioactive wastes are not worse than those produced by conventional reactors. “These inputs are publicly available to the paper’s authors and their omission undermines the credibility of the paper and its conclusions,” NuScale’s email said.

In a public letter this summer responding to NuScale’s accusations, Krall and the study’s other authors — Rod Ewing, a Stanford professor of nuclear security, and Allison Macfarlane, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairwoman — wrote that the NuScale design, approved by the NRC in 2020, was all that was publicly available at the NRC when they did their analysis. The fuel burn-up figures were redacted, they wrote. They stand by the conclusions of their study based on the 2020 NRC-approved design. The most recent version of NuScale’s design changes was not available when the three obtained their information from the NRC.

No grant money is allocated for a follow-up study, Krall said.

NuScale and its original reactor design are the brainchildren of Jose Reyes, then-head of Oregon State University’s department of nuclear engineering and health physics. He co-founded NuScale in 2007 and is now its chief technology officer. 

”The members of our leadership team bring extensive backgrounds in nuclear energy development, expansion, and investment. Most importantly, they understand the role small modular reactors will play as zero-carbon energy solution amidst climate change and ongoing energy insecurity issues,” said NuScale’s email to Crosscut.

Oregon State University is the venture’s original major financial backer. In 2011, the international construction and waste management company Fluor Corp. became majority owner with a 57% share. NuScale went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

For the first six months of 2022, NuScale had a net loss of $44.8 million while posting $5.2 million in revenue. For the first six months of 2021, NuScale lost $47.3 million while earning $1 million in revenue. At this relatively early stage of its publicly traded existence, NuScale makes money on consulting and loses money on research and development costs.

NuScale representatives predicted the company would need $200 million through 2024 to continue developing its small modular reactor. It currently has a war chest of $351 million, according to figures released in late August. In April, NuScale acquired $341 million when Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company based in the Cayman Islands, merged with NuScale. A special-purpose acquisition company is a publicly traded shell company.

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Central Washington is eyeing nuclear power again — but on a smaller scale is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Just off Interstate 90 as it climbs the eastern side of the Cascades, Terra Sullivan and her family stumbled out of their car at an electric vehicle charging station outside Cle Elum. A thin layer of dirt coated their arms and legs, a souvenir from a few days of camping at Lake Chelan.

They joined the constant rotation of cars pulling through the charging site a couple miles from the small town’s main drag in late July as the state settled into a heat spell. While their 40-minute charge took longer than the average pit stop to fill a gas tank, it gave them time to walk their dog, eat lunch and use the restroom at a nearby cafe. And with a range of more than 200 miles in their Kia Niro’s battery, they needed just one stop to recharge on their journey home.

Not all trips in their electric vehicle go as smoothly for the Olympia family. 

“We plan our trips a little differently,” Sullivan said. “On the Olympic Peninsula, there’s not a lot of chargers, so we have to be strategic.” 

In just the past few years, the number of electric vehicles registered in the state more than tripled as new EV options became available, according to state licensing data. This year so far, one out of every 10 vehicles sold is an EV. Today about 100,000 EVs roam Washington highways and streets, though they still make up a very small proportion of vehicles on the road. 

Gov. Jay Inslee wants to significantly increase that number, ideally ending the sale of new gas-powered cars statewide by 2030. The greater Seattle area, with 70% of EV cars registered to drivers in King, Snohomish or Pierce counties, leads in EV adoption as well as investment from the private market in charging stations to the region. 

Outside the Puget Sound area, a classic chicken-versus-egg conundrum still plagues the rural EV market — without ubiquitous charging stations, “range anxiety” over getting stranded far from a charger continues to discourage rural adoption. And without more EVs on the road, building new charging sites isn’t profitable for the private market. 

A surge in federal infrastructure dollars could spark the beginning of a national charging network. Washington transportation officials last week submitted a wide-ranging plan to leverage federal money into building out the state’s EV charging grid, but transitioning rural Washington to battery-powered travel still comes with a broad set of challenges.

Less than 2% percent of the state’s existing charger sites meet the latest federal standards while others become obsolete as more efficient chargers emerge. Many locations require costly utility upgrades or high operation costs, which leave private companies wary of investing in charging sites in remote or rarely used areas. Making the shift will take flexible planning, along with more money to install chargers everywhere — not just along interstates and major roads. 

If the state can’t get ahead of those concerns, EV advocates warn rural drivers could be left behind.

Easing range anxiety

Tri-Cities EV driver Jennifer Harper relieved her range anxiety in 2017 by buying a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, which contains both a gas and electric engine. Harper’s commute matched the daily range of the electric engine, with a bit left over for errands. She charges it overnight to power it up for the next day. And when she journeys away from the Tri-Cities, the gas engine fills the gaps in the charging infrastructure along the route.

“For me, I just really like the experience of driving on electric. Just how smooth and quiet it is, it reminds me of being on a boat on a crystal clear lake,” said Harper, who sits on the board of the advocacy group Drive Electric Washington. She also works for Energy Northwest, a consortium of public utility districts and municipalities, where she helped lead the effort to build out EV charging infrastructure. She recently transitioned to a different role. 

“I drove a plug-in-hybrid,” Harper said. “So I wouldn’t say that I was all in. But for the time, with the infrastructure on the eastern side of the state not yet there, it made the most sense.” 

In 2020, her lease up, she chose another plug-in-hybrid. 

“It’s definitely a lifestyle change for anybody that makes the full commitment to driving only electric,” Harper said.

In the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the massive recovery plan passed to activate the economy in the wake of COVID, there’s $5 billion set aside for states to jumpstart a national network of public EV charging stations. With this money, the federal government aims to relieve some of that range anxiety for new EV drivers by subsidizing the buildout of a fast-charging network — filling in the holes the private market or state investment hasn’t yet plugged.

The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, NEVI for short, will send $71 million to Washington state over the next five years. To receive this money, states had until Aug. 1 to submit a NEVI plan, a blueprint for how the funding will be spent. 

Washington’s newly released NEVI plan focuses on making it possible for the mass adoption of electric vehicles, said Tonia Buell, an alternative fuels program manager for WSDOT and the agency’s lead for the program. 

“We’re thinking about all potential drivers,” she said, “not just where the current early adopters are, but where people in cities and small rural communities can drive electric.”

Buell said she is all too familiar with the gaps in the EV charging system and the “flatbed of shame” after running out of electrons in her EV near Olympia, stretching the limits of her car’s range. She couldn’t just shift her EV into neutral and get it towed, but rather a flatbed truck was needed to haul the car off to a charger. 

Today, a charging station exists at the spot where Buell ran out of electrons.

Costly grid upgrades 

Roger Ovink, another EV driver in the Tri-Cities area, bought his car to use just around town. He eases his range anxiety by never being farther away from home than his current battery range. 

In the two years Ovink has owned it, he has only charged the car at home using a trickle charge. 

Basically three types of charging exist. Most people charge overnight at home, and a trickle charge, the slowest of all, is usually all they need. It uses a regular outlet, like the one a cell phone plugs into, but can take more than a day, and in some cases more than two days, to charge a fully depleted battery. 

Level Two chargers take about four to 10 hours to recharge an average battery. People with long commutes may need one at home, which requires an outlet similar to a washer and dryer. 

Fast chargers, the quickest refueling option for EVs, drop refueling time to 15-45 minutes. These are seen as the bare minimum needed for drivers looking to get right back on the road. 

NEVI funds can only be used for direct current fast chargers, and federal stipulations also require that four be installed at each location, which may require more power than currently exists at many rural sites.

Jared Knode, an energy and professional services manager with Energy Northwest, can’t think of an installation for an EV station that didn’t require a utility upgrade. Usually the nearest transformer, which provides the power to the site, needs to be upgraded.

“This isn’t necessarily just true of rural locations, either,” he said. “But it’s certainly true in rural locations.” 

Ford Motor Co. and Jeep’s first forays away from internal combustible engines have helped drive EVs into the mainstream market, especially in rural areas. Within a year of release, each of these models – the F-150 Lightning, the Mustang Mach-E, the electric Wrangler – all ranked in the top 10 models sold in the state. 

Charging up an electric Ford F-150, which advertisements boast can power a home for up to three days, in less than an hour takes a lot of charging capacity. 

“That’s a lot of power to cram through the system in less than an hour,” Knode said.

And for sparsely used charging stations, large spikes created by fast charging could drive up energy prices for regional utilities.

“It runs the risk of driving our rates up for people who don’t even use the charger,” Knode said. “You’re gonna have utilities, they’re just gonna say … the risk is too great.” 

To access the federal funding, each charging site at a minimum must be fitted with at least four fast chargers, capable of delivering power at 150kW and filling a vehicle’s battery in about 15-45 minutes. And EV stations must be no more than 50 miles apart from each other, and within a mile of designated alternative fuel corridors. Funds don’t expire, which may come in handy as states reckon with inflation and long wait times for equipment due to supply chain disruptions. 

These NEVI requirements could be a challenge for our utilities, said Harper, the Tri-Cities EV driver with Energy Northwest. 

Flexibility around the requirements such as number and mix of chargers — both fast and level two-type charging, along with the spacing of stations  — could allow more utilities to host charging stations, she added.

The available capacity remains very site dependent, explained Rendall Farley, a manager of electric transportation for Avista Utilities in Eastern Washington, but there are also workarounds for bringing more power to these rural sites.

“In some cases, there’s medium voltage utility power very close, with plenty of electricity,” he said. “And in other cases, there’s a bit of work to do to make that happen or battery storage might be needed to support the fast chargers.”

Some stations could be set up to slowly pre-charge on-site batteries and then drivers could fast-charge off those batteries to get back on the road faster, he added. NEVI funds can be used to update electrical infrastructure.

The NEVI money is a key piece of establishing a national network of fast charging along interstates, Farley said, so that people can confidently take their EV on a longer trip without inconvenience.

Completing the EV charging network

Garrett Brown waited 20 years for the electric car he purchased in 2011, so range anxiety was never something he needed to conquer. His first road trip from the Tri-Cities to Anacortes in 2012 required careful calculations to plot out the mileage between charging stations. Even with meticulous planning, his Nissan Leaf needed a recharge every 60 to 80 miles. For that first leg of the trip to Kirkland, Brown and his wife left well before dawn and arrived long after dark.

“I’ll just say that that was beyond the limits of the infrastructure at the time,” said Brown, who founded the Mid-Columbia Electric Vehicle Association.

At one point, a sympathetic barista let them plug in for a few hours at a coffee shop after an unexpected headwind left Garrett questioning if the car had enough juice to make it to their first planned stop. 

“We obtained the grace of several people in several locations to help us,” Brown recalled. 

Switching to a Tesla a few years later allowed Brown to tap into the company’s proprietary charging station system that far outpaces today’s public system in its reach. There’s talk of Tesla opening up its charging stations to other EVs, as state and federal government money flows into the industry, but for now it’s a big selling point for the company. 

The same trip from the Tri-Cities to Seattle’s Eastside now nearly rivals the time it takes in a gas-powered car, requiring just one recharge, he said. New destinations still require some forethought while a few other places, like Mount Rainier, still remain out of range.

Washington leads in EV adoption, along with California and Oregon. These three states banded together to create the West Coast Electric Highway. But large gaps still exist in the charging network, especially outside urban areas. Some of the charging infrastructure is fast becoming obsolete – as ever speedy charging options emerge and larger batteries become available – and many don’t meet the requirements set out in the NEVI plan. 

About 1,650 public electric vehicle chargers can be found statewide, but fewer than 200 locations offer DC fast chargers. Transportation officials say only 27 of those sites meet NEVI program standards. Some sites don’t have enough charging stalls or enough power capacity to be a fast charger, especially the older sites. Many Tesla sites meet, or even exceed, the NEVI requirements, but aren’t publicly available. 

NEVI funding stipulates that states start outfitting highways designated as alternative fuel corridors, making sure there’s coverage at least every 50 miles, before tackling other roads. Washington’s NEVI plan prioritizes charging coverage along I-5 and I-90, followed by I-82/I-182, U.S. 395 (south of Spokane), U.S. 101 and U.S. 195.

“A very important part of the NEVI program is really to build charging stations just ahead of the demand for the charging stations to then really spur on and trigger accelerated adoption of electric vehicles,” said Molly Middaugh, director of business development at EVgo. The company builds and operates charging stations while also consulting on how to build out EV infrastructure. 

“I think having these stations every 50 miles on all the designated major highways and corridors will be a huge step in helping to accelerate transportation electrification,” she said. 

When deciding where to build EVgo sites, Middaugh said the company takes into account the number of EVs registered, nearby amenities, traffic patterns and types of housing in that area.

Still, even with the new federal money to build stations, Middaugh said EVgo has no plans to bid out projects on its own and own stations built with NEVI funding. Instead, the company plans to partner with companies like Pilot Flying J, the ubiquitous truck stop chain, on proposals for the money. 

Buell, with the state Department of Transportation, said officials hope to encourage investments in all sizes of communities by bidding out NEVI-funded projects along entire highway corridors or segments, not just individual sites. She noted that approach, which WSDOT used to distribute state EV funding, still hinges on additional guidance from the federal government. 

“That’s likely the strategy we’ll use for contracting, particularly to avoid vendors cherry picking the best spots and skipping the rural areas where usage is anticipated to be lower,” Buell said. “So they’re gonna get some high-usage locations, then they’ll have to put some stations in that aren’t going to get as much usage.”

In the end, WSDOT does not want to own these stations, but rather create public-private partnerships to build these stations, and leave operations and maintenance up to private companies or utilities. Some rural sites might also require ongoing subsidies for maintenance and operations to meet reliability standards, which can be done with NEVI funds for up to five years. 

As proposals come in, WSDOT will consider different amounts of ongoing support between urban and rural sites depending on anticipated usage, Buell said. 

Part of the NEVI funding also requires that 40% of the overall benefits from the program go to disadvantaged communities. To do that the state is also developing a publicly available mapping and forecasting tool that shows existing EV drivers, daily traffic counts, employment, existing chargers along with health and environmental disparities data and racial demographics to help guide the state in choosing new sites.

Rural gaps remain

Jon Jantz, an energy consultant who works mostly with nonprofits and rural electrical utilities on electrification, said NEVI is a great foundational first step to building out a charging network, but it’s going to take a lot more funding and investment to really fill in gaps across rural Washington. 

The competitive grant process could leave many small towns behind, he said, noting the groups and areas who need the NEVI funding most often have the fewest resources. 

“They don’t have a grant writer. They don’t have somebody who’s up to speed on all the nuances of this and how to do it,” he said. “Most are never even going to hear about the program.”

Some sites might need larger power capacity and/or more charging stalls than required in the NEVI plan to meet future demand, Jantz said. That’s where flexibility in the plan is important, which the state is allowing for, he added.

Rural areas also stand to benefit from widespread EV adoption. Charger access can draw new visitors to small communities (and result in them spending more money as they wait to recharge). Many rural drivers tend to have longer commutes and often spend more of their income on transportation than their urban counterparts. 

While it’s more expensive to purchase an EV – though advances in battery technology are quickly dropping prices – owners of these cars spend about half as much on repairs and maintenance compared to a similar gas-powered car, according to an analysis done by Consumer Reports. Shifting from gas to buying electrons can drop fuel bills by 40%. 

While moving to EVS will not reduce traffic congestion or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, it is one of only two plausible pathways to a deep decarbonization of road transportation, said Don MacKenzie, associate professor at the University of Washington and director of the university’s Sustainable Transportation Lab. The other is hydrogen.

“Notwithstanding the one issue of range and recharging time, in terms of how they drive, how they accelerate, how much they carry, their comfort,” MacKenzie said, “[EVs] meet or I would even say greatly surpass conventional vehicles and their capabilities. So it’s a really exciting time from a product standpoint.” 

“The one way we could screw this up,” he said, “is if the infrastructure isn’t there.”

Expansion of electric vehicle grid hits roadblocks in rural Washington is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The following story is published in partnership with Crosscut, an independent, reader-supported, nonprofit news site covering the Pacific Northwest.

Correction: The solar panels installed as part of the Colville agrivoltaics project will produce up to 20 kilowatts of power. An earlier version of this story used an incorrect unit of energy.

Two geodesic domes are being built in Nespelem, 16 miles north of the Grand Coulee Dam and the headquarters of the Colville Indian Reservation. Ricky Gabriel jokes that they look like Thunderdome from the dystopian 1985 movie Mad Max.

Gabriel, an Okanogan County contractor, sees the Nespelem domes as a challenging math puzzle, requiring precisely cut and fit wood braces to create the ball-like structures that will be covered by transparent crystal plastic to become greenhouses.

The domes consist of 20 straight sides that create half-balls that are almost 20 feet tall and 35 feet in diameter. They each make room for roughly 1,000 square feet of crop space to grow a variety of vegetables and flowers, spread out horizontally and stacked on shelves vertically.

These compact growing spaces also leave room for solar energy to grow outside. An adjacent two rows of solar panels will be capable of producing up to 20 kilowatts of electricity. 

The solar cells will provide electricity to heat and run the watering equipment for the domes. The food and surplus electricity will go directly to nearby homes. And the planning and execution of this so-called agrivoltaic project will be an example to be spread across the grid to planners, farmers and engineers interested in learning more about this new way of using farmland to grow both food and electricity at the same time. 

“The community is very excited about it,” said Tauni Bearcub, the project’s manager for Konbit (pronounced “kone-beet”), a Boulder, Colorado, company specializing in food-growing programs with an emphasis on Native American lands. She is also a member of the Colville nation.

The project is due to be ready by July — less than a month after President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures to boost supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia. This will be Washington’s first venture into agrivoltaics, the mingling of solar-power panels with growing crops.

The idea of agrivoltaics first surfaced in 1981 in Germany as a proposal by scientists Adolf Goetzberger and Armin Zastrow that solar panels and agriculture can share the same land to make it more profitable. The concept took off about 10 to 12 years ago as the costs of solar power dropped. This practice, also known as agrophotovoltaics in Germany and solar sharing in Asia, remains more common in Europe than in the United States.

In the United States, agrivoltaics has gained toeholds mostly east of the Mississippi River while also popping up in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and now Washington in the West. 

“The East Coast has been a little more proactive on this one,” said Chad Higgins, an associate professor in the biological and ecological engineering department at Oregon State University.

Agrivoltaic sites are small. Jordan Macknick, lead energy water and land analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, estimated that crops and solar panels jointly use only about 50 acres of land nationwide. The Nespelem site is about one-third of an acre.

Macknick said agrivoltaics does not appear practical for farms with hundreds and thousands of acres, but these projects are more appropriate to install on a small scale. “The sweet spot is 20 acres or less,” he said.

There are three types of agrivoltaic ventures. The first is solar panels among crops. Second is grazing by sheep or other animals munching grass in the shade of solar panels, which can be found in New York and Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota installed 30 kilowatts’ worth of solar panels on a dairy farm in 2018 to conduct a 2019 study on how the cows interact with the solar panels. That study determined that the cows sought the shade of the solar panels, causing them to graze less. The university plans follow-up studies on the cows’ reproductive performance plus the long-term effects on their health, milk, fat, and protein production, as well as weight and body condition.

The third type of agrivoltaics involves flowers, in which bees wander around the solar panels collecting pollen to make honey. Such projects can be found in Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin.

The hair-care company Aveda keeps beehives on its campus in Blaine, Minnesota. It added a 900-kilowatt array of solar panels to the field of flowers used to generate electricity for its campus. 

National acreages on the grazing and beekeeping agrivoltaics are not available.

Solar panels and farming flourish best on the same types of level, loose soil that accommodates both crops and steel beams. Even with growth in agrivoltaics, the need for clean power is likely to increase tensions over rural land use in many places. Estimates for the amount of land required to meet Biden’s 100% clean electricity goal by 2035 range from an area bigger than Delaware to a footprint the size of South Dakota. 

“There’s going to be massive pressure on agricultural lands from solar,” Higgins said last September at a Washington State University Extension Service video conference in San Juan County on agrivoltaics. Higgins did not respond to several email and phone requests for an interview. San Juan County farmland — which is also very expensive real estate — has been steadily shrinking in recent years, and he offered agrivoltaics as one answer to that challenge.

Agrivoltaics requires a delicate balancing act among sunlight, costs, solar panels and crops. The solar portion and the crops portion have a very complicated relationship. 

A major challenge comes in deciding what crops will be grown. There are limits on the height — usually six to eight feet — of the solar panels, which translates to how much expensive steel must be used. The height and angles of the panels affect the shade and sunlight reaching each row of crops. It’s worth noting that not all crops need sunlight all day, and some do better when shaded some of the time. The space between the rows of solar panels must accommodate the biggest piece of farm equipment to be used. Another wrinkle is that the types of crops may change from year to year.

“For the most part, the solar part of the equation is much more straightforward,” said Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. 

“Ag needs to adapt to whatever solar array is there,” said Byron Kominek, a co-owner of Jack’s Solar Garden of Longmont, Colorado, which has four acres of solar panels and works closely with the lab.

One universal truth appears to be that the generation of electricity is the bigger and more reliable money-maker on these farms. Macknick estimated that the electricity sales from a site could reach up to twice as much as the crop sales. 

Another complicating factor is regulations. Agrivoltaics combines industrial and agricultural rural land uses, a concept that does not fall neatly into zoning regulations almost anywhere. Macknick and Higgins said land-use rules vary from county to county. 

When Jack’s Solar Garden, which produces 1.2 megawatts of electricity a year, was first proposed five years ago, its host county would allow only 100 kilowatts to be produced on its farmlands, so they had to get the local zoning rules changed.

Insurance is another headache, with competing priorities from usually separate entities: Developers want a restricted site, while farmers want easy access. Oregon State University is just opening an experimental agrivoltaics farm with many different governments and owners involved. 

“The insurance conversations were spicy. Who is liable for what?” Higgins said, adding that the attorneys “ran through months and months and months of ‘what if’ solutions.”

In the video conference, Higgins noted that a major obstacle to deploying electric cars in great numbers is their limited range coupled with the lack of rural charging stations. Strategically placed agrivoltaic farms could serve future rural and interstate highway charging stations, he speculated. 

Enter Konbit, whose projects include extremely small farms, including the agrivoltaic operation in Nespelem. “If you grow food on microfarms, why not add photovoltaics?” said Konbit founder Sanjay Rajan.

Rajan is a longtime Colorado entrepreneur specializing in financing small ventures such as boosting textiles being produced in India and providing food for the poor, especially Native Americans. Originally an engineer, he has M.B.A.s from Columbia University and the London Business School.

Rajan brought in Hugo Grisetti, a longtime architect of geodesic domes from Brooklyn, to design the Nespelem domes. 

The Colville nation does not have an energy department, and Konbit is not connected to Nespelem Valley Electric Co-Op. The $100,000 Nespelem project is being paid for with federal grants. A $48,000 annual National Renewable Energy Laboratory grant will be used to gather data from the Nespelem project for three years. The actual annual operating budget still needs to be pinned down. “It’s a prototype. We don’t know yet,” said Konbit’s Bearcub.

The Colville reservation is divided into four districts, and Bearcub hopes to eventually install one set of domes in each district.

Macknick said of the Nespelem project, “We’re hoping it will be a model to really expand.”

On Washington’s Colville reservation, solar-powered microfarm looks to prove model to boost food, energy sovereignty is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.