Energize Eastside comment summary leaves many questions for residents

Eastside residents, business owners and community organizers submitted thousands of pages of documents expressing both support and disapproval of the Energize Eastside project.

The city of Bellevue — the lead agency on the project’s Environmental Impact Statement — read the letters, recorded comments and signed petitions and released a comment summary report last week.

The report — which is not an official part of the environmental impact statement, but rather a handy guide for decision makers as the project moves forward — has had mixed reactions.

From the group proposing Energize Eastside, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), the comment period didn’t really bring any surprises.

“The city is kicking off Phase 2,” said Jens Nedrud, senior project manager on Energize Eastside for PSE. “There is no action here, but now the scoping period will look at route-specific options.”

The report looked at concerns voiced in the comment period and responded briefly to each one.

Energize Eastside is a project proposing to increase electrical reliability on the Eastside. Several options were presented to the city of Bellevue (in cooperation with the other cities the project would impact) in Phase 1 as solutions to an aging power grid. PSE’s preferred option, and consequently the most controversial of the proposed alternatives, is an 18-mile long 230-kilovolt (kV) line which would stretch from the Sammamish power station in Kirkland to the Talbot Hill power station in Renton, running through Kirkland, Redmond, Bellevue, Newcastle and Renton.

These cities will decide on a “preliminary determination about which alternatives should be carried forward,” in a more detailed Phase 2 draft environmental impact statement after a 45-day scoping period.

Some residents feel the proposed line represents an unnecessary risk as it would share a utilities corridor with a petroleum products pipeline not far from residences and schools. Others are afraid of the line ruining their view and property value.

Still others, including business owners, want the line built as soon as possible and the Eastside power grid brought up to federal standards.

Don Marsh, president of Citizens of Eastside Neighborhoods for Sensible Energy (CENSE) is not one of these people. He and his group have balked at the comment period summary appearing to disregard many of their complaints and concerns.

“The comment summary had a glaring omission, in our view,” he wrote. “We spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars working with industry experts to develop an alternative solution based on well-proven technologies (enhance efficiency, demand response, combined heat and power and a little bit of energy storage). This community preferred alternative is cheaper, safer, more reliable and better for the environment than PSE’s preferred proposal.”

This alternative was not acknowledged in the comment summary, CENSE said.

The utility company has claimed repeatedly that the 18-mile 230-kV line is the only alternative which effectively meets the needs of the Eastside while maintaining rigorous federal standards.

PSE has released a preferred route for the line dubbed “Willow 2.” The route would run south from the Sammamish substation along Bridle Trails State Park to the Richards Valley in Bellevue at a new proposed transformer substation named Richards Creek. From there the line would extend over Interstate-90 and would split near Tyee Middle School. One branch of the line would head along Southeast Newport Way carrying a 115-kV energized line built to 230-kV standards before changing to a double-circuit 115-kV line on Factoria Boulevard Southeast and then back to a single-circuit 115-kV line on Coal Creek Parkway Southeast. The tallest poles in this branch would be 80-feet tall.

The second branch of Willow 2 would be a single-circuit line on 65-foot tall “H-frame” poles which heads directly southwest to meet up with the first branch near Coal Creek. The reunited lines will then head south through Newcastle and into Renton.

“We tried to use the existing corridor as much as possible,” Nedrud said. “We’ll be replacing every four existing poles with one or two poles along the route. All the route are in existing infrastructure and there are no condemnations of homes.”

A 100-foot wide utilities corridor which houses the majority of the proposed Energize Eastside project will continue to maintain the Olympic pipeline as well as the 230-kV line if the project moves forward.

Next on the agenda is a Phase 2 scoping period, which will allow the entities in charge of the process for Energize Eastside to focus on what alternatives will be looked at in more detail. Currently, only the PSE plan and the “no action” plan are on the slate.

There are several public meetings for residents to provide comments during the scoping period, which ends May 31.