On an ancient lake bed in central Oregon, where the alkaline soil clumps and crumbles and only sagebrush grows, are the beginnings of Seattle’s future.
It’s terrible land, owner Randy Kruse freely admits, bought in the 1970s by his grandfather, who’d only ever known the fertile ground near Portland. Kruse and his son gave up grazing cattle here because it wasn’t worth the water to even try.
But what is lacking in its soil is made up for in sunlight, which cuts cleanly through the high desert’s dry air.
Seattle’s appetite for electricity is growing, whet by charging stations and data centers, electric buses and new apartments. Residents and businesses consume more than ever, and more extreme weather has pushed the power grid to the limit. The city wants and needs to mine the Kruses’ light 400 miles southeast for its own.
It’s a new line of work for a department that, even five years ago, only knew surpluses.
Drought has sucked water from behind the concrete walls of the dams of Seattle City Light, which for much of the past century offered a seemingly endless supply of cheap and clean power.
In turn, Seattle City Light now believes it needs to add more than 1,800 megawatts of power by 2033 — roughly double what the utility produces today. It’s a staggering number, and does not include data centers in the city, which consume huge amounts of energy.
So, for the first time in its long history, the public utility has begun to look beyond hydro for sources of energy. Adding fossil fuels to Seattle’s mix is discouraged by state law and politically untenable.
City Light is already under contract for two solar projects in Oregon. One will be on the Kruses’ land. The other is outside Prineville, on a property once used for spreading septic waste.
It took nearly a decade for these two properties to get where they are today and each will provide between 40 and 50 megawatts of power — a sliver of the city’s projected need.
Powering Seattle’s future
Seattle City Light has contracted with NewSun Energy to build two 200-acre solar fields in Central Oregon. Each will contain around 140,000 panels.
The green power landscape was already bottlenecked in the Northwest to the point of stagnation. Now, President Donald Trump’s spending bill will roll back much of the industry’s tax credits, making it certain to further contract.
The stakes are clear.
Seattle’s rates, which will likely rise regardless, could climb significantly without new energy. At worst is a future with blackouts — an unlikely scenario for now, but not an impossible one, city officials acknowledge.
“It’s gotten to the point where, instead of saying, ‘In 20 years, we should be doing this,’ it’s now: ‘We are starting to do these things,’ ” said Siobhan Doherty, City Light’s power supply officer.
For City Light, then, the task is finding enough paths through the twisting renewable energy environment to meet its needs. Seattle must find the people on the ground ready to build and connect, and to do it before the other West Coast utilities get there first.
“This is a new era for them,” said former state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, who authored the 2019 state bill to phase out fossil fuels.
From bust to boom
In 2018, a City Light review panel sent then-Mayor Jenny Durkan a letter “ringing the alarm bell.”
Demand for electricity was shrinking and the department’s revenue was going with it. Forecasts showed declines in consumption every year for the next 20, putting the department’s financial outlook on shaky ground.
But by 2022, the picture had flipped. Electric cars were ascendant, urged on by state incentives, and buildings were becoming increasingly plugged in. Talk of electrifying buses and ferries and demand for faster computing power meant the forecast climbed.
At the same time, extreme weather events caused huge peaks in energy use and drove prices to new heights. In December 2022 and January 2024, during cold snaps along the West Coast, the city set records for power consumption, forcing City Light to dip into its emergency reserves. Summer use also increased as the heat dome of 2021 spurred widespread adoption of air conditioning.
All this was happening during periods of drought. Below-average snowpack in the mountains meant Ross Lake, which feeds three City Light dams, was shallower than normal, squeezing the city’s flexibility for power generation.
The same issues facing Seattle are facing the rest of the West Coast, meaning competition for supplemental energy on the open market is steep. From 2020 onward, the average cost of power generation jumped to $80 a megawatt-hour from the previous 20-year average of $38.
Taken together, City Light’s projections for meeting the city’s energy needs skyrocketed. In 2022, it estimated the city would need 400 new megawatts of power; by 2024 that had climbed to 1,825 — a whole second city’s worth of electricity.
“We’ve found all of the low hanging fruit for energy efficiency,” said Doherty. “We’re trying to figure out: How do we meet the moment? How do we find different types of resources?”
New salesmen emerge
Jake Stephens doesn’t consider himself a prospector.
Still, he searches the West for untapped opportunities offered by the land. Stephens, who wears a wide-brimmed hat, a turquoise belt buckle and occasionally a bolo tie, has spent many hours of his life staring at maps, tracing property borders and their proximity to power lines, searching for the parcels best suited to building solar fields. From the cab of a Ford F-150, he glazes over the yawning beauty of central Oregon, instead pointing out each dangling line, noting its direction and how many megawatts it can carry.
“Ultimately, you need this kind of complex intersection of ground that works, can be built, is near power lines, is generally private land, has a willing landowner and doesn’t have a variety of other issues which can emerge,” he said.
As the rest of the clean energy sector began waking up to the possibilities of the Northwest, Stephens had already been here for a decade, massaging out agreements with families to build on their land and holding a spot in line to plug into the power grid. Where others assumed it rained across the state, Stephens suspected its high desert was underappreciated. He began placing bets, signing contracts up and down central Oregon.
The gamble is paying off: When City Light put out the call for more electricity, Stephens’ company, NewSun Energy, was better prepared than almost anyone to deliver power within months, rather than years. The two solar fields Seattle wanted, which will likely come online next year, are tests — experiments by City Light that will help chart the path for expanding their energy ambitions going forward.
The true value of Stephens’ assets is not the land itself, though he’s proud of that too. Rather, it’s how soon those properties can connect to the Bonneville Power Administration. That, experts say, is the most valuable asset a developer can hold.
“Acquiring renewables, it isn’t about the resources,” said Randall Hardy, former superintendent of Seattle City Light and former administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration. “It’s transmission, transmission, transmission.”
Bonneville, which controls the majority of the Northwest’s power grid, is so behind on connecting providers it’s not currently accepting new applications.
Many in the queue are looking to 2030 and beyond before they can plug in — rendering moot whatever land or other assets they might hold, no matter how prized. As a result, Washington and Oregon are some of the slowest states in the country to add new renewable energy, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported recently.
That’s not the case for Stephens. Several of his projects are plug-in ready. And of the possible solar projects in Oregon ready to come online by 2029, he estimates NewSun controls as many as half — a hard-fought and valuable holding that gives him the swagger of a man whose bets have paid off.
But once NewSun is tapped out, the solar picture gets murkier for Seattle. Competition between West Coast utilities for new resources will be steep, and utilities like Puget Sound Energy have to find even more than Seattle.
City Light is also putting stock in wind and geothermal. But wind also relies on Bonneville transmission. And while Bonneville is now investing heavily in updating its lines, progress is slow.
“Figuring out how to navigate the complexity of this transition is really hard,” said former Sen. Carlyle, “and expecting that they’re going to have an answer by Monday morning at 9:30 coffee is a tough sell.”
“Not sexy stuff, but it’s critical”
Randy Kruse doesn’t think much about climate change, if at all.
“I have other stuff to worry about,” he said, standing feet from rows and rows of solar panels already built on his property. What Kruse and his son do worry about is the price of alfalfa. They grow a high-protein product, prized for dairy cows, on the more fertile plots of their land. But prices have been in the tank lately and breaking even has been a challenge.
Solar is a backstop to those years.
“The solar income helps our farming operation immensely,” he said.
Kruse admits he’s considered covering all 3,600 acres of his property with the panels; in today’s market, it would probably be more profitable. Pride in the work and the product and his son Ryan’s drive to keep farming are enough to stop him from doing so, for now.
The openness of central Oregon, which saps up sound like it’s in a vacuum, is a world away from Seattle. Lake County, where the Kruse land sits, voted more than 81% for Trump, the most Republican county in Oregon, a mirror image of King County.
But aside from some grumbling at the bar, solar development has been largely welcomed in the area. Local officials signed off on the permitting, and the panels look like a mirage on the landscape.
Kruse is proud to power Seattle. “I think that’s incredible,” he said.
Trump’s spending bill is likely to make the partnership between places like Seattle and Lake County more difficult. Though the bill allows a short runway for projects to get off the ground, the Bonneville queue means new projects will miss out. Stephens estimates, without the tax credits, the price of solar will go up 40%.
“People don’t know what their costs are going to be in the future,” said City Light’s Doherty, “so they’re less certain, they’re going to slow down their own development, they’re going to want contracts to provide flexibility on pricing so that they can take that into account.”
For residents and businesses in Seattle, that will mean higher prices. Even without the tax and spending bill, the days of paying $38 a megawatt-hour are likely gone for good; in 2024, the Seattle City Council signed off on 5.4% rate hikes.
“It’s a tremendously uncertain time,” said former Bonneville head Hardy, “and the fact is it’s going to be more expensive.”
In Seattle’s City Hall, it’s a conversation that comes up only occasionally, generally when it’s time to review the next year’s rates.
The City Council’s energy committee has long been reserved for the body’s most junior or disfavored member, held for years by former Councilmember Kshama Sawant and now under control of Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck.
“Candidly, nobody runs for City Council or for mayor saying, ‘I want to lead the transition to a renewable energy future,’ ” said Carlyle. But it’s time for City Hall to “really lean in,” he said.
Mercedes Rinck insists she did run for office, in part, to help with that transition.
“I know this is not sexy stuff, but it’s critical,” she said.
In a recent briefing with City Light, staff told Mercedes Rinck that in just the past year it has received 11 applications to plug in new data centers. Not all of those may come to pass, but it’s a sign of what’s to come. Bridging the gap between the needs of today and the realities of tomorrow will be a challenge, Mercedes Rinck acknowledges.
“I have to believe that it’s achievable,” she said. “It has to be for the sake of our region.”
