Guest Opinion | The solar promise that wasn’t

How a small island’s experiment in clean energy became a lesson in what happens when a co-op stops listening to the people it serves

||| FROM ALAN MIZUTA |||

I own a piece of a solar farm. I paid for it. I’m proud of what it was supposed to be. I’m considerably less proud of what it became.

The Decatur Island microgrid, OPALCO’s first community solar array, was described to state grant-makers as a future national showcase for equitable community solar. It was described to the Decatur community as a prototype that would deliver direct local benefits. What neither audience was told is that OPALCO’s power provider already runs one of the cleanest grids in the country, nearly 97 percent carbon-free before a single panel went in. The green energy story was always thin. What the project really had going for it was available grant money, and a member-owned cooperative that had learned how to go get it. This is the story of what happened next.

I know this story from the inside, because I helped pay for it.

The Deal

A few years back, OPALCO came to the Decatur community with a proposition. We could become “subscribers” in a pilot solar project right here on our island. The pitch was compelling: clean energy, a shot at reasonable financial returns as quickly as 7 years with state incentives, and most importantly for an island that used to lose the mainland connection often enough that backup power wasn’t theoretical, a real community benefit. The battery storage system, we were told, could be isolated to serve Decatur alone during outages, buying us somewhere between half a day and a full day of backup power when the mainland connection went dark.

What the pitch didn’t mention was that OPALCO buys its power from the Bonneville Power Administration, whose own published figures show 88 percent coming from Columbia River hydropower and another 9 percent from nuclear. Wind and solar together account for less than 1 percent of BPA’s portfolio. The grid serving these islands was already nearly carbon-free. The people making the pitch knew exactly what BPA’s portfolio looked like.

I have a design and engineering background. In prototype work, I’m comfortable with things not working the first time. The whole point is to learn why, document it, and fix it. That standard matters even more when the stakes are this high. OPALCO has described a vision for roughly 800 acres of solar across all the islands, an order of magnitude beyond what exists on Decatur. A prototype for a rollout that size is not the place to cut corners. It is the place to get everything right, because every decision made here gets replicated across every island in the county.

I was all in.

What I didn’t know could fill a prospectus.

The Math Nobody Showed You

I was also, it turns out, an unwitting participant in one of the more creative financing structures you’ll find in rural utility economics. Call it a ratepayer pyramid.

Here is how the money actually worked. For every $1,000 a subscriber like me committed, roughly $1,340 came from state and federal grants, the kind funded by everyone’s taxes. That alone should give pause. But here is the number that kept me up at night once I finally understood it: for every $1,000 subscribed, OPALCO’s ratepayers, every household on every island in the county that has electricity, contributed approximately $1,720 in subsidies. Most of them had no idea this was happening.

Do the math. For each thousand dollars I put in, expecting a modest return on a responsible green investment, my neighbors were quietly on the hook for $3,060. Over three times as much. The subscribers sat at the top. The ratepayers underwrote the whole structure from below. No prospectus. No disclosure. No line item on anyone’s electric bill that said: “This month, you’re subsidizing your neighbor’s solar subscription.”

Public investment in clean energy infrastructure can be legitimate. But there is a meaningful difference between transparent public investment and a financing arrangement that only makes sense if the people at the bottom of it never find out how the numbers work. OPALCO’s members, all of them, deserved to know. They weren’t told.

Cutting Corners at the Start

The financial structure wasn’t the only thing that didn’t advertise itself. Neither did the permitting.

The original Decatur site was developed under a Provisional Use Permit. What regulators now generally agree was actually required was a Conditional Use Permit, a meaningfully higher bar that would have triggered more rigorous environmental review. The lower-standard permit is what OPALCO set out to obtain, and what it ultimately secured. It got through.

During site development, areas we now recognize as wetlands were graded. Nothing in the permitting process at the time required monitoring or controls for stormwater or subsurface water flows. We will never know the full environmental cost of that decision. What we do know is that neighbors downhill from the site began noticing increased surface and subsurface water flows across their properties, coinciding with the clearcutting and filling of land that had previously absorbed and filtered what fell on it. The site had no monitoring infrastructure. There is no baseline to compare against. The corner was cut, the permit was obtained, and the question of what was lost in the process has no clean answer.

The Reality on the Ground

The site is at a dusty intersection of two gravel roads. There is no water. Not for washing solar panels, which lose efficiency when coated with the grit that two unpaved roads kick up all summer long. No water for employee sanitation either. For years, OPALCO workers servicing this remote site had nowhere to relieve themselves except the woods.

The panels were installed with 75-foot Douglas firs directly to the south. In Washington. Where the sun is low in the sky for much of the year. Shadowed for months at a time. A basic solar siting analysis would have flagged this. OPALCO apparently did not run one, or did not act on the results, because the shadow problem was only addressed after construction. OPALCO then approached the adjacent landowner, a county property, to request a clearcut. The additional clearcut happened. And the performance still lags what was expected by double-digit percentages advertised to thinly justify the finances. But neighbors noticed the sequence: panels first, problem discovered second, fix arranged third, and the fix was represented to the county in a way that, to put it charitably, obscured that timeline.

The promised split-rail fence that would honor the rural character of the island became a towering chain-link barrier. When community members asked why, they eventually learned the answer: the general manager did not trust the Decatur community. He was worried about vandalism. From a community of a few dozen year-round residents, most of whom had welcomed and invested as subscribers in the very project. No one can point to a protest of the prototype project. And, not incidentally, it is the most heavily trafficked intersection on the island, one that the general manager apparently monitors closely enough that the video surveillance feed is often his video meeting background.

The islanders who were told the battery system could isolate Decatur during an outage eventually learned that this was not technically possible. The outage-protection benefit that had been a central selling point could not be delivered. What is striking is not that a prototype fell short of every promise. That is what prototypes sometimes do. What is striking is the divergence in how OPALCO’s own management explained when they became aware of the problem. The accounts did not align. In engineering culture, you document when you discover a failure, because documentation is how you learn. Here, the timeline went soft.

The Community Tried

What happened next is the part that still stings.

Decatur residents, including engineers, renewable energy professionals, and serious investors, did not give up. They formed working groups. They produced detailed technical analyses, at no cost to OPALCO, on how to improve the existing site’s performance and intelligently site additional solar on the island. They identified adjacent properties, including former quarry land with acres of disturbed ground and prime solar exposure, whose owners were prepared to offer them up for future projects.

OPALCO did not respond. Not with enthusiasm, not with criticism, not even with a thank-you for hundreds of hours of volunteer expert work. The reports were submitted. The offers were made. The silence from management was total. The board, similarly approached, was equally silent.

The local volunteer fire brigade and concerned neighbors offered to help with vegetation control on surrounding driveways and access areas adjacent to the site, at no liability to OPALCO. OPALCO declined. Inside the fence line, the grass continued to accumulate under and around the panels, a documented fire hazard on an island with zero fire suppression resources and fire response times from off-island that routinely exceed an hour, if they come at all. OPALCO later acknowledged it had no labor or equipment on the island to address the problem. Its proposed solution for the expansion project is herbicide application near Native Growth Areas and in proximity to as many as nine wetland areas.

Residents also raised the dust problem directly, noting that keeping the dust down on the adjacent gravel roads during peak summer months would measurably improve panel output during the period of maximum production. That suggestion went nowhere.

Friends of the San Juans, a respected regional conservation organization with decades of work in the county, reached the same conclusion independently. In a formal letter to county planners, they noted that clearing six or more acres of healthy forest to install solar arrays runs counter to the climate goals renewable energy is meant to serve, and that existing cleared lands, impervious surfaces, rooftops, and utility rights-of-way represented more appropriate sites than forested land. They had communicated this directly to OPALCO. The response was consistent with what the Decatur community had already experienced.

At some point, a community stops feeling like a partner and starts feeling like a host being managed from a distance by someone watching the surveillance feed.

Fire and the Illusion of Safety

This is where the story becomes genuinely alarming.

The Decatur site is not just a solar array. BPA’s submarine cables surface on Decatur and run overhead to the substation at the center of the island’s dusty intersection. From there, overhead lines branch back out to the other islands before going under the sea again. The substation is the hub for every watt of power reaching the San Juan Islands. The solar panels and battery storage sit directly beneath and beside those lines. If something goes wrong here, a fire, a battery event, a cascading failure, the whole county can go dark. Getting to Decatur to repair it can take days, by private barge, depending on tides and weather, to say nothing of the heavy equipment and materials any real repair would require.

Decatur is a densely forested island. The county’s own Community Wildfire Protection Plan, developed with OPALCO as a participating member of the steering committee, describes it as predominantly covered by second-growth conifer forest, with abundant dead and downed woody debris throughout. The same plan identifies the substation, solar array, and battery storage as critical infrastructure, and warns that fires at lower elevations on Decatur have the potential to spread uphill quickly, potentially blocking the only escape routes off the island. The plan also notes that overhead utility lines running through forested corridors represent a live ignition risk, one that right-of-way maintenance is meant to address. The grass accumulating inside the fence line was not a theoretical concern. It was a documented hazard at the precise location the county’s own emergency planners had flagged, in a plan OPALCO helped write.

For years, the site had no fire extinguisher. None.

On May 10, 2025, a battery-powered golf cart parked in the road immediately adjacent to the substation caught fire while its owner collected eggs from the farm across the road. The thermal monitoring system, routing alarms to a station somewhere in the Midwest, did not trigger. Fire experts in the county have confirmed what becomes obvious once you say it plainly: even if an alarm had fired, there is no one on Decatur to respond. OPALCO might have been notified. They could in theory have called the Department of Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over unprotected wildlands in Washington. But DNR does not respond to structural fires, and certainly not to energized electrical infrastructure. No agency in the county has the training or personal protective equipment to manage a solar or battery storage incident.

The community raised these concerns. They raised them publicly. When King 5 News brought a camera crew and a drone, things began to move. The panels got washed. The grass got mowed. A porta-potty appeared. A five-pound fire extinguisher was installed.

A five-pound fire extinguisher. At the site that powers the entire county.

Bailer Hill, and the Pivot That Explains Everything

To understand how Decatur became the salvage plan, you have to go back to San Juan Island and to a second grant, separate from the one that built the original Decatur array, that set a very different set of decisions in motion.

OPALCO received a $1 million state grant through Washington’s Low-Income Community Solar Deployment program. The intent was to build a solar array on San Juan Island generating bill credits for low- and moderate-income households across the county and offsetting the energy costs of nonprofit service providers on the three main islands. Decatur was not part of the program’s design. It is where the money ended up.

The grant was awarded in 2021 for a project on San Juan Island, with construction scheduled for completion in 2023. It is now on its fifth extension. Four years later, after extensive spending on design, engineering, and planning, the project stalled in permitting.

Rather than reset, OPALCO pivoted. The remaining grant money, now reduced to approximately $430,000, was redirected to a new site on Decatur Island. Forested land, requiring clearcut. An island of 142 registered voters with no ferry service, no public services, no emergency resources, and no equipment or infrastructure capable of supporting a construction project of this scale.

By OPALCO’s own admission, the co-op spent $430,000 in grant money and $660,000 in ratepayer dollars on design and engineering without knowing that deed restrictions, clearly visible in the title record, made more than half the site legally undevelopable.

The co-op also purchased the Decatur property. It sits on the books, unbuilt. So does the Bailer Hill parcel, land OPALCO acquired on San Juan Island for the project that never broke ground. And somewhere, under tarps, quietly aging in the sun they were designed to capture, sit roughly 4,500 solar panels purchased with ratepayer funds and slowly depreciating.

The low-income households the grant was designed to serve live on San Juan, Orcas, and Lopez. The grant was written for those islands. Decatur is not among them, has never been among them, and will receive no bill credits from the project bearing its costs. It is the one island in the county that already hosts a utility-scale solar installation, that has already absorbed the environmental impacts, the broken promises, and the fire risk that comes with it, and that has the least capacity of any inhabited island to support what is being proposed next. The three main islands, with their ferries, their fire departments, their rooftops, their rights-of-way, and the overwhelming majority of the county’s population, have not been asked to carry a comparable burden.

When “No” Means “We’ll Change the Rules”

By this point, the project had a second site it couldn’t legally build on, a grant it couldn’t spend as written, and a community that had stopped believing the promises. The response was not to step back. It was to rewrite the rules.

The deed restrictions, when discovered, were substantial: a Native Growth Area covenant covering approximately 3.82 acres, an open space requirement mandating 30 percent undisturbed, and a Conditional Use Permit requiring a forested buffer. OPALCO had a choice.

OPALCO, represented by a Washington, D.C. law firm, sent letters to San Juan County expressing intent to revise both covenants.

The county acknowledged it had never received such a request before. Not for a Native Growth Area. Not for an open space covenant. These are instruments that run with the land. Banks rely on them when writing 30-year mortgages. Neighbors rely on them when buying property. They are the foundation of the county’s land use system, and they are not suggestions.

A publicly funded cooperative, using state grant money earmarked for low-income energy assistance, asked local government to do something with no precedent: erase environmental protections so that a project never properly sited could limp forward anyway.

A Boundary Line Modification was also sought and initially approved, with errors significant enough that the legal description included property OPALCO does not own. Title companies have declined to insure it. That modification remains on record and remains under challenge.

Around the same time, OPALCO approached the County Council about a 20-year lease of a five-acre parcel owned by Public Works, land directly south of the original solar site and surrounded by OPALCO’s newly acquired property. The proposed rent was $100 per month. The full five acres was to be cleared, graded, and grubbed, with roughly three acres covered in solar panels. At least one council member was surprised to learn, in that meeting, that OPALCO had already purchased the surrounding twenty acres without informing the county.

What $98 Million Buys

OPALCO carries approximately $98 million in debt. There is no funded plan to replace the aging undersea cables connecting the islands to the mainland grid, the same cables whose failure would leave the entire county without power, and whose vulnerability is the current justification, though the justification has changed before. Green energy gave way to community benefit, which has given way to energy independence, a compelling argument everywhere except on a cloudy archipelago in the middle of Puget Sound in January. Decatur was chosen because the money needed somewhere to go.

Private solar investors don’t go to the west side of the Cascades. The only utility-scale arrays that have, including the original Decatur project and one in Arlington, were both Commerce-subsidized. That is not a market signal the Washington State Department of Commerce appears to be reading. Commerce has shown no sign of reviewing whether this program makes sense on its face, complies with its own terms, or is directing state funds toward dismantling the environmental protections it was never meant to touch.

What remains of the original grant, now reduced to $430,000, a 57 percent haircut on money written specifically to help low-income households pay their electric bills, is being redirected to Decatur, where a new round of subscribers will sit at the top of a new pyramid while ratepayers and taxpayers underwrite the base.

OPALCO is member-owned. That is not a shield. It is an obligation. The board answers to every household on every island that pays an electric bill, and those households own this organization’s debt, its unbuilt parcels, its depreciating panel inventory, and its way of doing business. Member-owned means the members are the accountability mechanism. It always has.

The original Decatur microgrid was supposed to be the proof of concept. It proved something. The question now is whether anyone with the standing to demand accountability is paying attention.

The author is a Decatur Island community member and original investor in the OPALCO community solar program.