Decatur Island releases survey results

Survey administered by Decatur Island Alliance
December 2025

||| FROM DECATUR ISLAND ALLIANCE |||

Decatur Island Alliance, a 501c(3) non-profit registered in Washington state, was created in the first quarter of 2025 by a group of island residents who were concerned that there was no mechanism in place for community members to collaborate and tackle problems that impact the entire island.

When DIA was in its formative months, it was announced that OPALCO (Orcas Power and Light Cooperative) had been awarded a Washington state grant enabling the expansion of the existing solar panel array on Decatur Island. Without the
organizational structure necessary to drive a comprehensive evaluation of the issue, DIA deferred to community activists to act independently. DIA did not participate in conversations with OPALCO or San Juan County, however DIA did conduct monthly community meetings, enabling all neighbors, either in support of or opposed to the project, to speak.

After several months of input from various coalitions on Decatur Island, as well as OPALCO and San Juan County, DIA arrived at a blanket opposition to the project, as documented on the DIA website. To validate the collective position, DIA conducted a survey, targeting all property owners of Decatur Island, with the simple question: do you support the Solar Array Expansion project, as presented to San Juan County.

DIA Tenets

• Transparency
• Compassion
• Inclusiveness
• Respect
• Data-Driven
• Introduction

Methodology

• DIA collected property owner information from the San Juan County public website.
• DIA used the public Decatur Island Directory to associate email addresses with property owners.
• For homeowners that were not on the Decatur Island Directory, email addresses were crowdsourced from DIA members.
• Out of 285 parcels listed on Decatur Island, DIA secured contact information for 251 of those parcels.
• There was email bounce-back from 4 addresses, resulting in an initial survey depth of 247.
• Technology was used to ensure that there was not more than one response from a single IP address.

Question Rationale

DIA sought to ensure that the questions were as succinct and bias-free as possible. The first question provided background data to help property owners understand the project. The information provided in that question was collected from OPALCO and DIA participants who had independently researched the project.

The second question was a binary answer, either yes or no. The rationale for this format was to bolster the survey completion rate, as well as limit confusion or complexity for the constituent.

Survey Response Rate

• Number of direct emails sent: 247
• Number of property owners who did not receive email: 38
• Number of survey views: 176
• Number of survey starts: 114
• Number of survey submissions: 93
• Number of surveys started, but not completed: 21
• Completion rate: 81.6% (percentage of people who completed the survey once started)
• Engagement rate: 37.5% (percentage of people who were emailed and completed the survey)

Survey Results

Question 1:
The proposed plan:Size: The existing array is 0.5 MW. The proposed array would be 1.5MW.Storage capacity: OPALCO is not providing additional storage capacity.San Juan County solar energy: Decatur is the only island with an existing microgrid and there are currently no additional projects underway.Energy production: Once completed, the expanded array would increase OPALO’s energy production by less than 1%. (San Juan County uses 200,000MW/hour annually. A 1.5MW array multiplied by 8760 hours/year, using a 13% capacity factor (typical of arrays in the Western Washington
area) is 1708MW-hr/year. This amount, divided by 200,000, is 0.8%.) The generated energy will flow into the San Juan County power grid.The site: The proposed expanded array would be located across from the school, on 20 acres of land, near the existing transfer station.Site preparation: Eight acres of trees would be cleared to prepare the site for solar panels. Mitigation: The plan does not provide for mitigation of impacts on the roads or other island infrastructure associated with transporting materials to the island, preparing the site, building the array or maintaining it over time. Do you understand the proposal as presented?

Question 2:
Do you support OPALCO building a second solar array, as presented to San Juan County, on Decatur Island?

Choices Responses Percentages

• Yes 88 94.6%
• No 5 5.4%

Choices Responses Percentages

• Yes 19 20.4%
• No 74 79.6%

Conclusion

These survey responses reflect that the majority of Decatur Island property owners surveyed are opposed to the OPALCO Solar Array Expansion initiative.

Please contact info@decaturislandalliance.org if you have any questions about this initiative or would like to participate on any of the working committees.