For nearly a decade, Yakama Nation and its allies have been fighting a roughly $3.3 billion plan approved by the Trump administration that would transform a sacred site along the Columbia River into a giant renewable energy project. New information shows the project is intended to feed a hyperscale data center planned by the landowner.
“We’re not going green for Washington and Oregon state mandates. We’re going green for data centers,” said Elaine Harvey, a conservation scientist and member of the Yakama’s Ḱamíłpa Band. “And it’s putting pressure on our sacred areas, our food gathering.”
The battle over the site highlights the Pacific Northwest’s repeating history of building energy infrastructure at the direct expense of Native nations by harming their traditional foods, homes and sacred sites.
It also comes as skyrocketing energy demand is threatening to torpedo Oregon and Washington’s clean energy goals. Studies show that demand comes largely from the explosion of the data centers tech companies are using to power the artificial intelligence revolution.
And it turns out this project stands to be another example of that phenomenon.
If Rye Development builds its Goldendale Energy Storage Project, the sacred root gathering and ceremony site will be remade into a giant hydropower battery.
Rye says the project would produce enough electricity to power “500,000 homes” for 12 hours every time the 2.3 billion gallons of water sitting in a man-made reservoir atop the bluff is dropped about 2,000 feet down a 29-foot tunnel drilled into the mountain, spinning power turbines near the bottom.
The water would then be pumped back to the top when demand for power is lower, repeating the cycle when power demand is high.
Erik Steimle, who is leading the project for Rye, has previously told this reporter the project will make the power grid more reliable and keep energy prices affordable.
But government documents and online statements by the land owner show the power generated there may instead fuel a massive proposed data center on the site that has largely flown under the radar until now.
Documents from Washington’s Ecology Department show STACK Infrastructure is in talks to build a “data center campus” on the site, as reported by Northwest Public Broadcasting.
Scott Tillman owns the land where both the energy project and the proposed data center would be. His LinkedIn profile says that in addition to the hydropower project, he’s also working with STACK and Blue Owl Digital Infrastructure “to develop the world’s greenest 1GW+ hyperscale data center.”
“We do not propose projects on lands where we’re not invited to do so,” Steimle said last year. “This piece of private land that’s been industrialized for quite some time is owned by a landowner who has requested this type of development.”
Tillman declined requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Rye also declined to answer questions for this story, pointing Street Roots to the project’s financial backer, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. A spokesperson for the company did not reply to specific questions, instead sending a general statement on the project’s purported economic benefits and the federal tribal consultation process.
STACK and Blue Owl did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Washington Department of Ecology confirmed the data center project is in talks to buy the site.
“The developer submitted the data center related cleanup documents to Ecology, and the agency is currently looking them over to provide comments, etc,” wrote Brittny Goodsell.
‘Carrying the burden for green energy’
Hundreds of people from around the region came to the site of the potential development for a May 8 event hosted by Yakama Nation and the environmental nonprofit Columbia RiverKeeper.
The site is a shrub-steppe grassland ecosystem on a bluff about 3,000 feet above the Columbia River in Washington, just across from the mouth of Oregon’s John Day River.
Yakama people call the place Pushpum, or “Mother of all roots,” because it’s a natural seedbank, allowing almost three dozen different kinds of roots, flowers and shrubs to grow. Some plants can only be found there. Many are important traditional foods for Native people who have lived in the area since time immemorial.
“Our season starts at the foot of this hill in the end of winter, the start of spring, we have our first roots,” Chief Bronsco Jim Jr. of the Yakama’s Ḱamíłpa Band said at the May 8 event.
Jim explained to guests that Mid-Columbia Native people have always traveled the region in annual cycles following key foods including roots, salmon and huckleberries.
“Nobody planted these foods,” he said about Pushpum’s roots. “Nobody brought it here. It was intended for us to be here.”
The Three Sisters Mountains are visible to the south, and Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens to the northwest. Access to the area’s views is “critical for propagating the stories that form the architecture of regional Indigenous thought,” High Country News has reported.
Jim said his grandparents were among the last families following these seasonal rounds until World War II started and the U.S. Army forced them from the canyons they lived in.
That displacement was compounded when the federal government built the hydropower dams on the Columbia. Nearby Celilo Falls, for example, had been the longest continually inhabited site in North America before it was drowned by The Dalles Dam.
Harvey, from the Ḱamíłpa Band, spoke after Jim. Her family has twice been forced from their homes by hydropower development.
The first was when The Dalles Dam flooded the Willa-wy-tis Band’s village in Maryhill in the 1950s, and the second was in the late 1960s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed her family from Lower Rock Creek Canyon as the John Day Dam flooded the area, pushing her family to Goldendale where she lives today.
Her great-grandmother’s grave is under the Columbia in the reservoir created by the John Day Dam.
“We’ve been dealing with this green energy since the ‘50s, since the dams were being built, because there’s a demand for energy,” she said. “And we’re tired of carrying the burden for green energy.”
Part fight, part celebration
The May 8 event served two purposes: part fight, part celebration.
Helen Sekaquaptewa co-chairs the Yakama Nation Youth Council, and was at the event.
“Today, we’re gathered here to protect Pushpum, which is one of our sacred sites, from the quote-unquote green energy project that is proposed on our land,” she said of the first purpose.
Jeremy Takala, assistant secretary of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council, said the event aims to show people how they can help oppose the project, like by reaching out to the governor’s office.
The second purpose was to celebrate a recent move by the owners of the Tuolumne Wind Project, which surrounds Pushpum, to allow members of Yakama Nation to use the land for gathering.
The right to hunt, fish and gather at traditional places was enshrined in the Yakama’s 1855 treaty with the U.S. But Harvey and others said the right to gather had not been previously exercisable around Pushpum.
Ben Fairbanks is managing director of development for Clearway Energy, which bought the wind project about a year ago.
“We’re an energy company,” he said. “We believe there’s a need for renewable energy to defeat climate change, and we’re not opposing any specific energy projects. But we do believe it’s important to do our part to provide access to tribal organizations on projects where we build projects.”
Fairbanks said he saw “These Sacred Hills,” an award-winning documentary about Yakama Nation’s fight to prevent construction of the Goldendale Energy Storage Project. The film helped him realize his company now controlled parts of Pushpum. He reached out to Harvey to open up access.
“So we have a permanent access agreement for this land here to gather,” Takala told cheering event attendees. “Let’s hear it for Ben.”
Fight just beginning
Street Roots asked Rye Development and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners about the harms Yakama members detailed as well as the accompanying data center project and if they were planning for tribal access.
A spokesperson for Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners did not directly address those questions, except to say it has consulted with tribes during the federal approval process and over the last nine years.
The project’s cost is also not entirely clear. On its website, Rye says the project “(i)nfuses billions of dollars into rural Washington and Oregon.” It reshares news stories that put the price tag between $2 billion and $2.5 billion.
“It’s not built yet. There’s no shovels in the ground, and so there’s a real possibility that there won’t be, and we can all use our collective power to stop the project.”
Simone Anter
Columbia Riverkeeper senior staff attorney
But its documents show the ultimate cost is unclear. The project’s final Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license application from June 2020 cites earlier filings and puts the installed cost at $2.6 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $3.3 billion in April 2026 dollars.
But the document that the application cites says the $2.2 billion cost is actually just an estimate borrowed from a 2015 study of an entirely different failed pumped power storage project that Klickitat Public Utility District was pursuing.
Rye and Copenhagen also did not respond to requests for comment on the cost of the project. But it hasn’t stopped them from moving forward. Last year, the project received a key approval from the Trump administration.
Speaking at the May 8 event, Columbia Riverkeeper senior staff attorney Simone Anter said they will continue lawsuits over permits and the fight is just beginning.
“It’s not built yet,” Anter said. “There’s no shovels in the ground, and so there’s a real possibility that there won’t be, and we can all use our collective power to stop the project.”
Divide and conquer
The event drew attendees from around the region, including William Ray Jr.
He’s chairman of the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin-Paiute tribes, which together make up the Klamath Tribes.
The tribes have spent the last 15 years locked in battle with Rye Development over a similar project. The Swan Lake energy storage project would destroy the tribes’ sacred rock stack sites in southern Oregon.
“These stacks represent all of our prayers that were left by our ancestors,” Ray said. “And they were used for a variety of things: puberty, a loss of life, some form of event, no different than if we went down to the local 9th and Pine church, right? So those are our cathedrals, if you will, our places of worship.”
Ray said the company didn’t listen to them describe the harm it would cause.
“And what they did is they decided to come back with an offer — $40 million,” he said. “And it insulted us.”
Les Anderson, tribal council member for the Klamath Tribes, said the developers tried to pit the Yakama Nation against them, but failed.
Rye and Copenhagen did not respond to questions about the Swan Lake project.
‘Battling futures’
“When I was a little, little girl,” Harvey said, “I always remember digging with my grandma and my mom.”
But the wind farm — which Yakama Nation fought before it was built — prevented root digging for about two decades. After coming to Pushpum last year, she was blown away.
“It’s something we’ve never been able to do and I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is what our elders and grandmothers were talking about,’” she said.
The fight over the new projects is in large part about the ability of future generations of Yakama people to practice the traditions of their families.
Seventeen-year-old Sekaquaptewa first came to the area as a child for her grandmother’s funeral. She said the destruction of sacred sites like Pushpum stops traditions that have always been passed down.
“It separates me from my grandparents and then their parents,” she said. “These are lands that my grandparents, their parents had walked on and stewarded. And when projects are proposed, that takes that connection away from me, and then also the other youth.”
Surrounded by humming wind turbines and looking south from Pushpum over the Columbia into Oregon, it’s impossible to miss the collision of two worlds.
John Day Dam stands directly below, part of the hydrosystem that refashioned the basin with concrete and rebar into a series of slackwater pools that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in hydropower each year, makes hundreds of thousands of acres of desert bloom with crops and allows ships carrying billions of dollars in goods to travel from the Pacific Ocean to Idaho.
The ruins of the Columbia Gorge Aluminum smelter — which may soon become the data center campus — are next to the dam. The facility once produced aluminum for weapons company Lockheed Martin, and left the site potentially contaminated with cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls, volatile organic compounds and other pollutants. That’s according to a Washington Ecology Department report that said the agency isn’t sure exactly what is in the soil and groundwater.
Beyond the dam and contaminated smelter site, seemingly endless wind turbines sprouting from neat, spring green wheat fields blur into the distance with the help of the Columbia’s water, diverted for irrigation.
All of this has happened in what amounts to an instant when compared to Columbia Basin tribes’ history in the region.
“I think about the first encounters,” Harvey said. “Then there’s the railroad system, there’s the hydro system, there’s the highway system, and then there’s Hanford. Then you come into another era of smelters and all these different industries, transportation systems that have changed and altered this landscape and the Columbia River.”
But when Harvey, Jim and Takala talk about that recent history, they also describe the living history they have there, the area’s ecosystems and the desire to protect it all from new threats for future generations.
“As tribes, we’re not just thinking about ourselves, we’re thinking about the future. And it’s not just for ourselves, it’s for everybody. We’re advocating for clean water in the Columbia River,” Harvey said. “We’re advocating for clean air. We’re advocating for the wildlife to have habitat, for fish to have habitat.”
