Washington’s Yakama Nation received both a grant and a $100 million federal loan to build a large solar project. Held up by a series of bureaucratic hurdles, the funding could expire before the government lets the tribal nation access the money. OPB Investigative Editor Tony Schick joins us to explain how bureaucracy is getting in the way of progress.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Washington’s Yakama Nation received both a grant and a $100 million federal loan to build a large solar project earlier this year, but because of a series of bureaucratic hurdles the funding could expire before the government lets the tribal nation access that money. OPB Investigative Editor Tony Schick joins us to explain how red tape is getting in the way of the government’s own goals. Tony, welcome back.
Tony Schick: Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with the project itself. What is the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation’s plan?
Schick: We’ll get to the difference between what they originally planned and what they’re planning now. But the original plan was something pretty novel that I’d not seen before. They were gonna take old irrigation canals that run through the reservation, cover them and then put solar panels on top, and also have little hydro-turbines inside the canals. So they were gonna generate solar power from on top of the irrigation canals, and the interesting thing about that was it was gonna generate power but also keep the water cool. A lot of water evaporates in the sun, so it would solve both of those issues and it wouldn’t take any additional land out of agriculture production, etc. That was the original plan.
Miller: How would that be different from other renewable energy projects that have been proposed in recent years … either on tribal land or ceded land?
Schick: Well, there’s a long history, I imagine nationwide, but I know specifically here in the Northwest, of energy development encroaching on tribal resources and tribal lands – transmission lines, dams, etc. Also Hanford, of course. And recently, the Yakama Nation and Confederated Tribes of the Colville in Washington have been dealing with green energy development – wind and solar farms – being sited in areas that might interfere, disrupt or cause the destruction of cultural resources, whether that’s sites used for ceremonies or places they gather traditional foods.
One of those that comes to mind is a place called Badger Mountain. The difference between what’s happening there and this – One: it already has a tribal nation seal of approval. The Yakama Nation is putting it forth. Two: it’s on top of irrigation canals, meaning, you know it’s not gonna take up any other land that might be an important resource.
Miller: So the Yakama Nation said we want this and this is why it’s a good idea, and it seems like the federal government, in various ways, agreed. How much money in total was promised?
Schick: The federal government definitely agreed. There’s posts on the Facebook page from the Department of Energy director saying, “Sometimes the great ideas are the ones right in front of you,” talking about this project [and] announcing a $32 million grant, clean energy grant, for the tribe to build this. The tribe also got $100 million, or close to it, in a loan from the USDA – U.S. Department of Agriculture –for rural clean energy development.
Miller: What’s the timeline for all that?
Schick: These things take a lot of time. The timeline for those funds runs through 2031.
Miller: So let’s turn to the roadblocks, or the red tape, or bureaucracy – different ways to describe this. Your reporting found that part of the complication here has to do with the fact that different parts within the Department of Energy have different roles here, that grant making and giving access to the electric grid, for example, are separate. Who does what here?
Schick: There’s an office within the Department of Energy that would deal with grants and that sort of thing. And then here in the Northwest, the electrical grid, most of it is owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, which is within the Department of Energy, but kind of operates as its own entity. It has its own rules that it has to follow that are energy regulations, as an entity that owns transmission lines and transmits power, and all of that. So they’re both under the umbrella of the Department of Energy, but they’re operating very separately.
Miller: Can you walk us through the various hurdles that the Yakama Nation would have to go through to access this money? It’s complicated.
Schick: It is. I’m gonna try and do it in a way that doesn’t make your eyes glaze over. One is, there’s a very long line if you want to plug into the electrical grid. So you have a solar farm, a giant battery, whatever, that you want to plug into the electrical grid. Every time you want to do that, you have to have a study of what it’s gonna take, what the impacts are of that. And you gotta get in line. There’s a long, long line of people requesting to connect to the electrical grid because there’s a boom in green energy right now. So, they entered that line last November. And that takes years, and years, and years to get through that process.
There’s also a separate line for transmitting the energy. So if you want to move energy from point A to point B, you gotta figure out, are the transmission lines even big enough for that? Do we need new ones? And that takes its own study process. Then on top of that, you figure out how much money it’s gonna cost to build the new transmission lines, and you have to figure out how to pay for that.
In the case of this particular project, the Yakama Nation also needs to upgrade an electrical substation. That’s where different transmission lines meet. And that’s gonna cost an additional $144 million for upgrading a substation. That’s what Bonneville, BPA, quoted them, and they don’t know where that money is going to come from. Yakama Power told me that if they were going to cover that cost, they’d have to raise monthly rates [by] hundreds of dollars.
Miller: Meanwhile, didn’t federal officials say that when this goes through, this is gonna mean cheaper energy prices?
Schick: When what goes through?
Miller: When the solar project is done, it will lower energy prices.
Schick: Right, right. Yes. That’s the idea – when more energy comes online, it would lower energy prices.
Miller: But to build the infrastructure to even make it possible, unless some other pot of money is made available, that would have to go to ratepayers, also.
Schick: Exactly.
Miller: It also seems like a real chicken and egg situation, in terms of getting some of this infrastructure up and running. So you can then get the approval from the federal government to get the money to make the rest of it happen, which is just another layer of complexity. So, how long does the Yakama Nation have to get all of this together?
Schick: Well, the federal money, the grant and the loan, expire in 2031. They were both part of the infrastructure deals and that’s when those expire. So they have till then, but keep in mind everything that has to happen for that. The substation – the timeline for that is an estimated five to seven years. Getting their way through those queues could take a while.
And that’s the deadline – 2031 is when they have to have everything spent, and submit for reimbursement for the money. They need time to actually build the stuff. And as anyone who’s ever built anything knows, that usually takes longer than you expect.
Miller: Just to be clear, it’s not like the Yakama Nation has to go through a more complicated bureaucratic process than other grantees or other would-be project producers, right?
Schick: No, that is kind of the rub here, is that they are being put through the same process as everybody. BPA, which owns the grid, says that they kind of have to do it that way because of federal energy regulations. They can’t be playing favorites, and so they have to put everybody through the same process. Now, what that’s running up against is this promise from the Biden-Harris administration.
Miller: So let’s turn to that. What did the Biden administration say? What are their own stated goals when it comes to helping tribes create new sources of renewable power?
Schick: They signed an agreement – the Biden administration – with tribes in the Northwest, in the Columbia River Basin, saying that they would take many steps to recover salmon. And one of those steps was to build out clean energy that would be sponsored by tribes. So the promise was they’re gonna build between 1 and 3 gigawatts of energy, and they recognized that there are a lot of hurdles to doing that. And they vowed to work with tribes to find cost-effective solutions, to make money available, and to try to fast track or expedite things through these long lines that I’ve been describing.
Miller: Just remind us, what’s the connection between that promise and the decades-long fight over four Snake River dams?
Schick: The 1 to 3 gigawatts of energy that probably sounds like I pulled it out of thin air, is actually what they estimate will be needed to replace the output of the Snake River dams. As people have been hearing on this show, we have significant energy demands in this region, and we can’t just go taking things offline, if we’re not going to replace the power from that. So that energy is to replace the Snake River dams that would enable them to be removed someday and not lose all of the benefits from those dams.
Miller: What has the federal government actually done to carry through on its promise?
Schick: As far as results, I don’t know that there’s anything I could point to. Now, that’s not to say that nothing is being attempted. I know that there have been conversations between the Department of Energy and Yakama Power – the utility owned by the tribal nation – and I know that the Department of Energy’s lawyers have been looking at energy regulations, tribal law, to try and figure out, is there some way that we can prioritize these tribal projects? Can we find some legal way through this, to solve these problems that we’ve created?
Miller: What has the White House said specifically, if anything, about this situation with the Yakama Nation?
Schick: Nothing to me. Generic statements and a referral to the Department of Energy.
Miller: How do the Yakama Nation’s challenges here mirror, or do they mirror what other wind or solar developers have been facing regionally in recent years?
Schick: There are certainly similarities. There are some quirks to this project, in terms of the grant and the deadlines and the promises that have been made. Also the fact that they’re all going through the same process, does not mean that they’re all on equal footing, because there’s this long history, as we said, of energy development happening on the backs of tribal people. There is also the fact that reservations were set up with very little infrastructure, very little access to capital. So, yes, they’re all going through the same process. But it’s like the starting gate might be one place for a race, but if you had to run a marathon to get to the starting gate, it’s not like you’re actually starting in the same place.
There’s a lot of differences there. And the similarities extend beyond that, they extend simply to the fact that we have nowhere near the grid that we need going into the future. So projects all over the Northwest are waiting in this long line, waiting to get access to transmit power, and we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen with that.
Miller: You mentioned at the beginning that the initial plans that the Yakama Nation put forward, that they got money for, they’re one thing – putting solar panels over various irrigation canals. But it may be that they’re going to have to change that. So what’s being talked about right now?
Schick: Yakima Power is preparing for the reality that they will not be able to access all of the funds that they initially thought, and they are working on scaled-down versions. Maybe it won’t be nearly as many miles of canals as they thought. Maybe it actually won’t be on top of canals. Maybe they’ll have to just do a somewhat smaller solar array.
They are trying to find some way forward, and really changing the tires on a moving car, trying to do this all in real time, and scale back their plans even though sometimes the grants are for a specific thing. You can’t take a federal grant for one thing and then just use it on something else. So they’re trying to thread this needle of … we have to change our plans, but we also have to adhere to the grant, and they’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Miller: And, just briefly, the larger picture here in the Northwest in terms of electricity availability going forward, in about 40 seconds…
Schick: Data centers are sucking up huge amounts of energy. So is just the overall electrification. And if we don’t build out a lot more capacity for transmitting energy, generating energy, we’re gonna be in trouble.
Miller: Tony, thanks very much.
Schick: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Tony Schick, OPB Investigative Editor.
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