GOLDENDALE, Wash. – High up on the Washington side of the Columbia River near the John Day hydroelectric dam, members of the Yakama Nation gathered to protest a clean energy storage project slated to be built on a sacred tribal site.
Supporters of the Goldendale pumped-hydro energy storage project have said it will help meet growing regional energy demand, and the project developers tout its potential to one day power up to half a million homes without sending harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But mounting evidence shows a large data center campus could be among the main beneficiaries of that power.
At the event earlier this month, Yakama leaders and a handful of nonprofits fighting the project in federal court, including Hood-River based Columbia Riverkeeper, called on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson to intervene after state and federal agencies issued key permits to the project developers, a process 10 years in the making. This was despite a state review finding that it would have “significant and unavoidable adverse impacts” on Yakama historic sites and culturally significant plants.
The 700-acre hydrostorage project is slated to be built on the contaminated grounds of an abandoned aluminum smelter formerly owned by Lockheed Martin, and, more broadly, a site that has long encroached on a sacred Yakama site called Pushpum, meaning the “Mother of all roots.”
It’s home to Yakama archaeological sites and dozens of seeds, roots, flowers and shrubs harvested and protected by the tribe, some of which are endemic only to the area.
“I know we’re in a time when we need renewable energy, but why on our root grounds? Why on critical migratory corridors for hawks, for sage grouse and the deers?” asked Elaine Harvey, a watershed manager at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and a member of the Yakama’s Kamíłpa Band.
“And I say: For who are we building? We’re going green now for data centers,” she said. “We’re not going green for Washington and Oregon state mandates. We’re going green for data centers.”
The project’s owners, the Danish investment firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, have not disclosed details about who would buy the energy.
Paul Copleman, communications manager for the firm, did not answer multiple questions from the Capital Chronicle about who exactly the company would sell the power to, but instead said in an email that the project is meant to serve rising electricity demand in the Northwest, and that at full capacity it could support “enough on-demand renewable electricity to power about 500,000 homes.”
He added that the permitting process involved consultation with the Yakama and a lengthy public comment period.
“We remain committed to working with affected Tribes to finalize a Historic Properties Management Plan that safeguards cultural and historic resources,” he said.
Recent reports from Street Roots, Northwest Public Broadcasting and permitting documents and energy use data from the local public utility district reviewed by the Capital Chronicle make it clear Denver-based data center company STACK Infrastructure would certainly be among the power buyers.
STACK did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Ecology told Street Roots the data center is in talks to buy acreage next to the Goldendale energy storage project. Furthermore, Street Roots reported that Scott Tillman, manager of the LLC that currently owns the land where the energy storage project would be built, also lists on his LinkedIn page that he is working with STACK and Blue Owl Digital Infrastructure “to develop the world’s greenest IGW + hyperscale data center.”
Power for who?
If constructed, the multi-billion-dollar pumped-hydro storage project would work as a sort of gravity battery.
When wind or sun aren’t generating enough power, billions of gallons of water from a reservoir built above the river would be released down a large tunnel to turbines below, generating power before pooling in a lower reservoir. When abundant wind and sun are next available, the excess energy would be used to push the water back to the upper reservoir, where it would await release to recharge the turbines on another dark or windless day.
There is no sign the project is needed to provide more power to meet growing local energy demand in Klickitat County.
The local public utility district’s most recent projections in 2024 estimated industrial and commercial energy demand would rise only 3% in the next 10 years. And data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows electricity demand among Klickitat Public Utility District users is nearly the same for commercial and industrial customers today as it was 10 years ago. There are no data centers in the county as of now, no more than the STACK data center slated, and the district meets the needs of a steady residential customer base.
But in a 2020 letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, district officials wrote that they had “engaged in recent discussions with parties interested in pursuing the development of a data center facility,” adjacent to the proposed Goldendale energy storage site. The district has agreed to provide water needed to the Goldendale energy project, and said it would provide water to the data center if approved, but it would not be able to provide the data center with electricity unless it bought the power from a source like the Goldendale energy project.
That’s because the district currently buys all its power from the Bonneville Power Administration, and under the Northwest Power Act, it is not allowed to use that power to serve new single loads with a capacity greater than 10 megawatts — such as a “hyperscale data center.”
It’s more likely a private investor-owned utility would need to power the data center. In 2022, Puget Sound Energy filed an interconnection request with BPA for a 958 megawatt Stack data center to be built at what appears to be the Goldendale site, and listed it as in “study phase,” according to researchers at Columbia Riverkeeper. If built to that size, the data center facility running at its maximum could require as much as 80% of the 1,200 megawatts of energy the Goldendale pumped storage project could generate.
Meg Bommarito, an environmental planner at Washington’s Ecology Department, said application materials for the Goldendale project show it would require a new aerial transmission line across the Columbia River to connect to Bonneville Power Administration’s John Day substation. That means it could also be planning to sell power directly to BPA, but Bommarito didn’t have any information about the connection or buyers. The ecology department and the Klickitat Public Utility District directed all questions about who would buy the energy back to Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
For the Yakama, the project, process and opaque power buyers represent another round of multi-generational displacement, driven by new industrial energy consumption.
For more than a century, governments, corporations and individuals have engineered, harnessed and exploited the power of the Columbia River Basin’s water, winds and sparse landscape for energy at enormous cost to indigenous nations and the natural world. In the early 20th century it was hydroelectric dams to power the expansion of irrigated farmlands, towns and cities, then to make the extraordinary amount of aluminum used for planes and artillery during World War II.
Now, wind and solar farms dot the landscape to feed growing residential, but increasingly industrial, need for electricity with non-fossil energy, coveted after 150 years of pumping catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere to feed endless demand.
“We’re feeling the pressures of data centers and the push that they have, and that need that they have for water and the need that they require for energy,” she said. “I feel like it’s coming too fast, just like the dams came and our people were pushed aside.”
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