Lower Snake River Wind Facility

November Wind Storm

Customer Updates

As of 10 a.m., 85,000 customers remain without power, and more than 150 crews will be in the field today working to restore power. We will be prioritizing bringing the remaining schools back online and moving from neighborhood to neighborhood to repair distribution-level outages. We added more new crews overnight and also have crews wrapping up restoration efforts in other parts of our service area moving in to provide additional support to King County.

Crews made steady progress restoring power to customers overnight. Since the onset of the storm, we’ve restored power to more than 570,000 customers and brought all hospitals back online. We have nearly completed work on our high-voltage transmission system and repaired 47 of 49 substations – this work was necessary to complete so that power can reach your community.

While we’re making progress, the substantial amount of damage we are encountering from the hurricane force winds of the storm has made our work slower than expected, and we had to push back estimated restoration times for customers yesterday evening. We know that you are disappointed to be without power for this extended period. We appreciate your patience—we are working as hard as we can to restore your power as quickly as possible.

Lower Snake River Wind Facility

PSE’s newest and largest wind-power operation is the Lower Snake River Wind Facility. Spanning 21,000 acres in Southeast Washington near Pomeroy, Garfield County, this energy project builds on the success of our Hopkins Ridge Wind Facility in adjacent Columbia County, and our Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility in Kittitas County. Completed in early 2012, Lower Snake River contains 149 wind turbines that produce up to 342.7 megawatts of renewable energy. On average, the facility generates enough annual electricity to power 70,000 homes, while also contributing jobs and commerce to the local economy.

The three large wind farms we own and operate, including Wild Horse, Lower Snake River and Hopkins Ridge, generate enough annual energy, on average, to serve 165,000 homes. In some cases, we sell any excess green-energy attributes generated by our wind facilities to other entities across the nation. The revenue from these sales helps to reduce our customers’ power costs and allows other utilities to take advantage of the benefits of renewable energy.

Check out the tours and recreation opportunities we offer at the facility.