First of several Yakima County solar projects ready to start construction

Four solar projects have been approved for the State Route 24 corridor of northeast Yakima County, and one of them is beginning construction this summer. Three others are expected to be built sometime next year.

The Goose Prairie Solar Project has entered its construction phase, said Cody Burttschell of Brookfield Renewables, the site’s developer and operator.

“Construction should be starting the first week of July,” Burttschell told the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council at its June 21 monthly meeting. “We anticipate a completion date in late October 2024.”

Goose Prairie is an 80-megawatt project that was approved in December 2021 by Gov. Jay Inslee after being reviewed and recommended by EFSEC. It will be built on a 625-acre site near State Route 24, Den Beste Road and Desmarais Road, about 8 miles east of Moxee.

The construction will begin with preparing the site entrance and prepping the area for construction of the solar arrays, Burttschell reported to EFSEC. Stormwater and construction permits were approved by EFSEC earlier this year.

Goose Prairie’s state-approved site certification agreement was transferred in April 2022 from Seattle-based OneEnergy Renewables to Brookfield Renewables, based in New York.

Black Rock project delayed a year

Construction is delayed on the Black Rock Solar Project, roughly 12 miles east of Goose Prairie.

Unlike other area solar projects, the Black Rock project went through the county planning and approval process, rather than the state’s. Yakima County Hearing Examiner Gary Cuillier approved a conditional use permit in 2022 for the Black Rock project 20 miles east of Moxee on both sides of State Route 24.

The project, developed by California-based BayWa.r.e. Solar Projects LLC, will feature 264,000 solar panels spread over a 1,060-acre site north of the Rattlesnake Hills and south of the Yakima Training Center. It is expected to generate 94 megawatts, capable of powering nearly 20,000 homes annually in the region.

Work was supposed to have started this year. But Brandon Reinhardt, BayWa.r.e.’s senior director of land entitlement, told the Yakima Herald-Republic the Black Rock project will be delayed about a year from its hoped-for late 2024 opening.

“There’s a couple of things that play into that,” Reinhardt said. “The primary one is that we’re still working through getting an off-taker, a (company) that would buy the power. We’ve had starts and stops in conversations in that regard.

“Then separately there was an issue with PacificCorp wanting us to rearrange the location of our substation in the project,” he added. “Now that there are multiple projects out there, they thought it would be more efficient for us to locate the substation in a manner where they would only need to have one of those, instead of two. We are in the process of working that out right now.”

Once those two issues are sorted out, Reinhardt believes construction of Black Rock’s solar arrays and other infrastructure should begin next summer and take between a year and 18 months to complete.

“Typically on a project of this size we try to start sometime in the summer, so that would push us into next summer,” he added. “And that would put it online by September of 2025.”

High Top and Ostrea solar projects

When discussing a shared substation, Reinhardt was referring specifically to the High Top solar project immediately east of Black Rock, which also will use PacificCorp’s transmission lines to get its solar powered electricity into the regional power grid.

High Top and its nearby solar power project, Ostrea, will be built by California-based Cypress Creek Renewables after both projects were approved by the governor in April.

Those two 80-megawatt projects, like Black Rock in the county’s northeast corner off State Route 24, can provide power for a combined 30,000 homes, Inslee said as he announced their approval at Yakima’s Perry Technical Institute.

They are separate projects because they would be served by two different power lines: High Top by PacifiCorp’s Union Gap to Midway 230 kV transmission line, and Ostrea by Bonneville Power Administration’s Moxee to Midway 115 kV transmission line.

High Top and Ostrea cover roughly 1,600 acres each, with the solar panels and other equipment planned on 926 and 811 acres, respectively. The sites are north of State Route 24 and south of the Yakima Training Center on property owned by Zine and Najiba Badissy, who have agreed to long-term leases with the developer.

The Badissy family also is leasing some of its land to BayWa.r.e. for the Black Rock solar project.

Tai Wallace, senior director of development for Cypress Creek, said at April’s site certification agreement signing ceremony that construction of High Top and Ostrea should begin by early 2024, with a mid-2025 target for operation to start.

An off-taker has been found for the power generated by the Ostrea site, with details to be announced soon, Wallace said. Cypress Creek is still working to secure a user for the High Top site’s electrical output, he added.

County vs. state approval

While their location, transmission line use, land ownership and now targeted opening dates are virtually the same, a key difference in the High Top/Ostrea and Black Rock solar projects is how they were approved.

The state’s EFSEC officials spent months reviewing the High Top and Ostrea projects before recommending approval to the governor in February. The independent state agency has voting members from various state departments.

During the past year, area residents and public officials raised concerns about the approval process and environmental impacts as EFSEC hosted online meetings and public hearings over High Top and Ostrea.

Yakima County Commissioner Amanda McKinney participated in several of them, arguing the state’s push for green energy projects fails to consider public input, local government concerns such as the Yakima County solar farm moratorium, and the overall impact on the state’s energy grid.

Even more resistance to EFSEC and the solar and wind projects the agency is considering has come from adjacent counties.

In Benton County, county officials have passed moratoriums on solar power projects, and the controversial Horse Heaven Wind Farm proposal has seen the developer’s request for an extended application/approval deadline go before an administrative law judge.

In Klickitat County, local officials and hundreds of residents have organized to oppose the Carriger Solar Project planned about 2 miles northwest of Goldendale. A decision on that project’s consistency with local land use plans and zoning ordinances has been tabled until the EFSEC council’s August meeting.

Reinhardt, with Black Rock Solar developer BayWa.r.e., said his company typically chooses to go through the county or local government approval process.

“With most projects we do, we try to give deference to the local jurisdiction,” Reinhardt said. “These state processes (like EFSEC) are becoming more common now. They just added a new way to do this in California.

“But our experience has been that if you work with the local AHJs — what we call authorities having local jurisdiction — most of the time you can get a project done more efficiently and get happier stakeholders through that method,” Reinhardt added.

He said BayWa.r.e.’s efforts to reach out to the Yakima County Farm Bureau and other community and environmental groups helped Black Rock receive approval from the county’s hearing examiner.

“From my experience and from reading the responses that came (to the EFSEC projects), maybe some of these folks felt like they just weren’t being heard,” Reinhardt said. “It was demonstrated by our process that if you went and talked to them, they weren’t opposed to solar projects. I think they were opposed to losing the local control element.”