Sue Lani Madsen: It’s rural, but is it clean energy?

Since passage of the Clean Energy Transformation Act in 2019, Gov. Jay Inslee has zeroed in on expediting building alternative energy sources. The regionwide implications for central and Eastern Washington haven’t been part of the equation, an oversight in calculating cost and benefit which is the focus of the Rural Clean Energy Study.

Three public meetings were scheduled this week to take input on the impact on rural communities. “We know when a large global equity company comes in it drastically impacts community power dynamics,” said Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy.

It’s the political and financial power imbalance that impacts Washington’s rural counties.

The Department of Commerce report to the Legislature was requested by Rep. Mark Klicker, R-Walla Walla, and shepherded through by Dye. She stressed its importance because “we wanted to look at alternative energy at scale and have a clear picture of how this would affect all of Eastern and central Washington, and not just a parcel by parcel study.”

Loss of permitting control from county government to the state came up constantly at Tuesday’s hearing in Dayton at the Columbia County Fairgrounds. “We can’t even negotiate local community enhancements because companies know they can just jump to EFSEC (the state permitting process) and ignore us,” said one frustrated southeast Washington county commissioner who got away before I got his name.

Facilitator Susan Hayman, from Olympia-based consultant Ross Strategic, kept refocusing the group back to the purpose of the meeting, to “listen to rural communities talk about their rural communities” with a focus on community impact. The rural residents had larger questions.

Like, what really counts as clean energy? Why build industrial wind and solar facilities?

The audience kept pressing to discuss environmental downsides and raised doubts about wind turbines’ ability to produce enough energy in their lifetime to offset the carbon necessary to produce, transport, install and operate. Questions were raised about the diesel fuel required to haul turbine blades to construction sites, the life expectancy of industrial wind projects, and the plan for decommissioning wind and solar facilities when technology and tax credits inevitably change.

The study consultants did not seem to have anticipated the discussion taking this direction. In a progressive Olympia bubble, the greenness of wind and solar is an unquestionable article of political faith. At a rural county fairgrounds in Dayton, the question was what the plan is for the discarded turbine blades stored off Highway 12 near the Walla Walla airport.

The answer to environmental questions was always a variation of “we’re not studying greenhouse gas emissions, we’re looking at social impacts and financial impacts.” But Hayman agreed it’s a hard sell to tell a rural community to accept social tradeoffs in the name of “clean” energy without facing the greenwashing questions.

Hayman turned the focus to financial impacts. Many voices observed the benefits to Eastern Washington are few while the energy demand is in Western Washington. Given the cost and transmission loss to move power across the state, one man suggested building more alternative energy projects closer to the demand. “Doesn’t the wind blow in the Skagit Valley? Why don’t they build there?”

There was quick crowd consensus on the answer to that question. “Urban areas would get to say no, we don’t want to look at it.” And “rural areas don’t have that clout, our voices don’t have the same impact.” And once again “we have no control locally.”

Jobs and tax revenue are often cited as incentives for rural counties. Unfortunately, the economists tasked with doing the analysis reported the megacorporations behind industrial wind projects are not cooperating, and they’ve not had much luck getting data on construction cost or jobs from currently operating projects. They noted projects almost always change hands at least once after development, sometimes three or four times. Lack of transparency from industry contributes to the power imbalance.

Washington’s tax code makes the financial discussion a tough one to follow for the casual reader, but this crowd has been paying attention.

For counties without a retail tax base, the sales tax collected on construction of any kind is a huge budget boost. The state negotiated rebates offered to industrial energy facility developers are a huge loss. Columbia County Treasurer Carla Rowe estimated the value of sales tax rebates paid out as over $6 million in her county alone.

The tax base in a rural county grows slowly. A couple of farmers buy a new tractor this year, they pay annual personal property tax on a value that decreases with age. Wind turbines are taxed as personal property, the same as that tractor. When 53 wind mills went into the Oakesdale School District with an initial value of $1 million each, it jumped the school district into a higher bracket and it lost access to state levy equalization funds, according to Rep. Joe Schmick (R-Colfax). Public school administrators are concerned about the impact of depreciating value on school district patrons without major fixes to the state tax code. “We’re setting up small schools for failure,” Schmick said.

Then a voice in the crowd asked, “Why are they the only structure anchored to a massive concrete footing that is assessed as personal property?” Classifying wind turbines as real property like any other six-story tall structure instead of treating them like a tractor that just drove off the dealer’s lot would return tax base stability and control to counties. It would also provide an incentive to maintain wind turbines as valuable appreciating assets producing something of value instead of depreciating assets responding to tax incentives.

Unless of course what those global equity companies are really producing are tax credits instead of usable energy.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.