[By Christopher Alef, Snoqualmie resident, expressed are those of the author, not the Living Snoqualmie website. You may submit letters to [email protected].]
The Snoqualmie Valley’s cities have moved, one after another, to pause large battery energy storage system (BESS) projects. Snoqualmie, North Bend, and Duvall have each adopted a twelve-month moratorium, and Carnation is weighing one of its own. Each council that acted weighed what a utility-scale battery plant could mean for its community and decided it needed time.
That was the right call, but it only goes so far. A moratorium reaches only inside the city that passed it, and even there, it is breathing room, not a plan. The clock is already running, and the real question is what the Valley does with the year it bought.
This spring, Bellevue and Redmond released an independent study of their local electric grid, built in collaboration with Puget Sound Energy (PSE) and published for anyone to read. The cities hired their own consultant, examined the grid substation by substation, and, in the report, called for explaining “the why” to residents. It is a model for how a community and its utility can plan the energy transition openly, with data, before anyone commits to anything.
The Valley should do the same, but it faces a trap Bellevue and Redmond did not. The Cascadia Ridge project, a proposed 130-megawatt battery plant next to the Mt. Si substation, sits on unincorporated King County land near Snoqualmie but not in it, beyond the reach of any city’s pause. A patchwork of separate pauses cannot answer where these facilities go in the Valley as a whole. Joint planning with King County and the Valley’s utilities can.
We have already seen the alternative to planning. Cascadia Ridge was filed with the county at a site that PSE’s own 2021 location study did not recommend. That study screened 382 substations across PSE’s territory and pointed to 14 candidates for this kind of storage. None was in the Snoqualmie Valley. None was the Mt. Si substation. Whatever weight that study carries, no public analysis has explained why this site, rather than the alternatives, is the right home for a plant this size. Nothing in law requires a battery plant to sit at an existing substation, yet the wider field of options was never weighed in public. Left alone, the map of where these plants go gets drawn one developer application at a time. Planning is how a community draws the map instead.
Duvall’s moratorium already comes with a work plan to consult with fire, air-quality, and county partners. That instinct is right, but it should go further: the four cities should not each bargain with their utility alone. They should sit down together and build one shared, public vision for the grid here: where the substations and transmission lines go, what the grid will need as the region electrifies, and whether, where, and what kind of utility-scale storage belongs. The right table is wider than two cities and one utility. It includes all four cities and King County, the land-use authority for the unincorporated areas, the moratoriums cannot reach. It includes both of the Valley’s retail utilities, PSE, which serves Snoqualmie and owns the Mt. Si substation, and Tanner Electric Cooperative, which serves North Bend. And it adds the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal operator of the region’s high-voltage transmission backbone. With PSE, Tanner, and BPA all in the room, the cities are far more likely to reach something every Valley community can support, planning as one region instead of one permit at a time. The Bellevue/Redmond study itself notes that PSE has “an obligation to rate payers not to overbuild the system before there is a need.” Good. Then show the Valley that need, the alternatives, and the analysis, in public.
The moratoriums gave the Valley a year. Bellevue and Redmond showed what to do with it. Our cities should spend it demanding an independent, public accounting of what the Valley’s grid needs, and working with the County and the utilities to build a plan that meets those needs for the decade ahead. Let’s plan the Valley we want, before someone else plans it for us.
Comments
Good insight!
My biggest objections to the site are about the technology that we’re embedding into this substation/addition. Battery technology is changing rapidly. By the time the ground breaks, the design will be out-of-date.
What happens to aging batteries? Who replaces them? Who inspects them?
What happens when a for-profit company discovers that a line of its business is unprofitable so it “spins off” the line as a separate entity that then declares bankruptcy? Who then pays for the removal and cleanup?
We are allowing a technology solution to be the final build-out in a field where technology changes so rapidly that hardware goes out of date before the hardware ages past functionality.
No one wants to be the one holding the hot potato when this installation ages past *profitability*.
Other states that have allowed private, for-profit companies to site plants for various reasons because “it’s cheaper here” and “fewer people object” discover that the private company had zero interest in being a part of the community when the business needs dictated a need to eliminate an unprofitable or expensive-to-maintain production or storage site. Witness all the abandoned wells. The leaky storage tanks. The number of abandoned factories that sit unclaimed, full of substances such as abestos which were “state-of-the-art” when they were built.
Who is thinking of the future here, not of the for-profit business, but the community where this site will be located, offering little to no economic benefit to the community but consuming its resources and depending upon strapped city budgets to take the hit to support security and emergency management?
It’s time to say No to the idea that businesses can just consume the peace and the resources of a community because somewhere in a corporate boardroom some directors and presidents will be making oodles of cash with nothing that “trickles down” to the communities where they site their temporary businesses.