Wind & Solar Leasing in Garfield County, Washington

What is already built: the Lower Snake River Wind Project

The Lower Snake River Wind Project is the established wind facility in Garfield County -- 149 turbines built by Puget Sound Energy, completed in 2012, generating up to roughly 342-343 megawatts across land in both Garfield and Columbia counties. The project's conditional use permit went through a public hearing in November 2009, and construction ran from 2005-2006-era planning through 2012 completion (following an earlier, separate Wild Horse-style development timeline in neighboring counties). A detail genuinely worth noting for any landowner considering a wind lease: more than 98% of the farmland under lease for this project remains in active wheat production, meaning the turbines, access roads, and collection lines take up only a small fraction of the leased acreage rather than converting cropland out of use.

What's pending: Cloudwalker, filed the day the moratorium expired

Garfield County's Board of County Commissioners let a six-month moratorium on new wind-energy siting expire on February 6, 2025, before its Planning Commission had finished rewriting the county's wind/solar development ordinance. Enel North America filed a conditional use permit application for its Cloudwalker Wind Project that same day -- a genuinely dated, specific example of a developer moving the instant a temporary building freeze lifts. Cloudwalker, as proposed, would place up to 100 wind turbines (each up to 699 feet tall) across roughly 30,000 leased acres in the northeast part of Garfield County, generating up to 380 MW, with associated overhead transmission infrastructure requiring private rights-of-way extending east into Asotin County.

The Planning Commission held a public hearing on a draft wind-and-solar code update in mid-2025 but postponed a final recommendation to allow more time to review public comment. As of this research pass, a February 2026-dated staff draft of the new Wind and Solar Guidelines was the most recent version located -- meaning Cloudwalker's permit review, and any other pending or future wind-lease proposal in the county, is proceeding under the older ordinance in the interim rather than a settled, current rulebook.

What this means for a landowner evaluating a wind lease or nearby parcel

1. If your parcel is within or near the roughly 30,000-acre Cloudwalker lease area in northeast Garfield County, confirm directly with Enel North America and the county what stage the conditional use permit review is at, since the applicable siting standards may still change before a final decision.
2. If your parcel already sits within the Lower Snake River Wind Project's lease footprint, confirm the specific terms of any existing lease or easement recorded against the property with the Garfield County Auditor's recording office -- lease terms, payment structures, and any decommissioning obligations are set contract-by-contract, not by a uniform county standard.
3. Whether or not wind development touches your specific parcel, confirm the current, adopted status of the county's wind/solar ordinance directly with the Planning Department before assuming any setback, height, or conditional-use standard found in an older source (including this page) is still current.
4. For land clearly outside any existing or proposed project footprint, the underlying agricultural value of a Garfield County parcel is still overwhelmingly about its dryland wheat productivity, not wind-lease potential -- most of the county's roughly 2,258 residents and its wheat-farming economy are unaffected by either wind project.