Wind & Solar Leasing in Columbia County, Washington

Hopkins Ridge: operating since 2005, PSE's first wind facility

The Hopkins Ridge Wind Facility, owned and operated by Puget Sound Energy, has been running since 2005 -- notably, it was PSE's very first wind facility, predating the utility's larger wind buildout elsewhere in the state. The facility covers roughly 11,000 acres of leased land in the rolling hills northeast of Dayton, with 87 turbines producing an average annual output of about 404,000 megawatt-hours, enough to power more than 35,000 homes. As with most utility-scale wind facilities on farmland, the actual footprint occupied by turbine pads, access roads, and collection lines is a small fraction of the total leased acreage -- most of the underlying land typically remains in active wheat cultivation around and between turbines, similar to the pattern documented on the neighboring Lower Snake River Wind Project in Garfield County.

Tucannon River Wind Farm: a second, separate project

A share of the Tucannon River Wind Farm, built by Portland General Electric and located across Columbia and Garfield counties, also falls within Columbia County. The project uses Siemens turbines with a 2.3 MW nameplate capacity each, 116 turbines in total, for 267 MW of installed capacity -- with average output around 101 MW, enough to serve roughly 84,000 average PGE residential customers given wind's inherent variability. This is a separate, independently owned project from Hopkins Ridge (different utility, different turbine specifications, different in-service history), and also distinct from the still-different Lower Snake River Wind Project that spans Garfield and Columbia counties -- covered on this site's dedicated Garfield County wind-leasing page rather than repeated here. If your land or an adjoining parcel is near any of these three projects, confirm which specific facility actually affects it before assuming lease terms or turbine specifications from one apply to another.

What this means for a landowner or buyer considering wind income

1. If a parcel is already within Hopkins Ridge's or the Tucannon River Wind Farm's lease footprint, confirm the specific, recorded lease or easement terms with the Columbia County Auditor's recording office -- payment structure, term length, and any decommissioning obligations are set contract-by-contract, not by a uniform county standard.
2. If a parcel is nearby but outside an existing footprint, ask Puget Sound Energy or Portland General Electric directly whether any expansion or new-lease outreach is planned in the area, since wind-facility footprints have expanded over time elsewhere in the region.
3. Confirm current county zoning and any wind-energy-specific conditional-use or siting standards with the Columbia County Planning and Building Department before assuming a parcel's wind-leasing potential translates into an as-of-right use.
4. For land clearly outside both facilities' footprints, wheat-farming productivity remains the primary driver of agricultural land value in Columbia County -- treat wind-lease potential as a possible bonus for specific parcels, not a general assumption across the county.