Key Takeaways
- What’s Happening: Echoing Beveridge & Diamond’s recommendations from its 2024 report to the Washington Department of Commerce to speed development of renewable energy and other technologies necessary to meet Washington’s ambitious decarbonization goals, Washington State’s Clean Energy Siting Council has released its 2025 Annual Report, “Improving Clean Energy Project Siting and Permitting,” outlining its recommendations to accelerate the deployment of clean energy infrastructure. The report identifies barriers to achieving the state’s energy goals, including the lack of available transmission capacity, and proposes legislative and administrative actions to address them.
- Who’s Impacted: Clean energy developers, transmission operators, local siting authorities, and Tribal governments.
- How to Respond and When: The Council provides recommendations on transmission capacity, clean energy development, permitting, community engagement, and emerging technologies. These recommendations are not project or agency-specific. Stakeholders should review the Council’s recommendations and engage with legislators, regulators, local authorities, and community leaders to advocate for the adoption of policies where interests align.
Council Recommendations
Transmission
The Council identifies transmission capacity as the most significant bottleneck to clean energy deployment. It recommends creating a state entity to finance and develop transmission infrastructure, requiring utilities to improve the capacity and efficiency of existing infrastructure, and streamlining permitting processes for transmission projects via federal, state, and local coordination and the development of transmission siting and permitting tools.
Clean Energy Development
To accelerate project deployment, the Council recommends supporting projects such as microgrids that do not require transmission connections and incentivizing the conversion of existing sites from fuel-based power generation to clean facilities. The Council also recommends supporting joint development of clean energy projects with Tribes to improve economic and community development.
Permitting
The Council emphasizes improving permitting through meaningful engagement and proactive planning. Key recommendations include establishing long-term funding mechanisms for Tribal governments to support their participation in project reviews, including legal, technical, and cultural resource assessments. The Council also recommends early engagement with Tribes on proposed State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) categorical exemptions, ensuring that potential impacts on Tribal and cultural resources are adequately addressed.
To support local governments, the Council recommends providing planning resources, training, and standardized tools to help integrate clean energy into comprehensive plans and zoning regulations. This includes developing template language, standardized definitions, and guidance for reviewing and updating local land use policies. Additionally, the Council recommends a statewide effort to assess publicly owned lands for suitability for clean energy development, including rights-of-way, brownfields, and industrial areas. The Council recommends that funding and incentives should be made available to support Tribes’ and local communities’ participation in these planning processes.
Community Engagement and Emerging Technologies
The Council emphasizes the need for accessible, transparent, and inclusive community engagement in clean energy siting and recommends developing multilingual educational materials and outreach programs to inform communities about clean energy technologies.
To prepare for the integration of emerging clean energy technologies, like hydrogen, advanced nuclear, nuclear fusion, and agrivoltaics, the Council recommends supporting local governments in updating zoning codes and planning documents to account for gaps under current municipal codes. Additionally, the Council recommends that the state identify barriers to geothermal development through exploratory drilling, water resource studies, and collaborative planning with Tribes, agencies, and industry to inform potential future programmatic environmental review.