'Going green now for who?' Yakama protest clean energy project on sacred site to power data center

GOLDENDALE, Wash. – High up on the Washington side of the Columbia River near the John Day hydroelectric dam, members of the Yakama Nation gathered to protest a clean energy storage project slated to be built on a sacred tribal site.

Supporters of the Goldendale pumped-hydro energy storage project have said it will help meet growing regional energy demand, and the project developers tout its potential to one day power up to half a million homes without sending harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But mounting evidence shows a large data center campus could be among the main beneficiaries of that power.

At the event earlier this month, Yakama leaders and a handful of nonprofits fighting the project in federal court, including Hood-River based Columbia Riverkeeper, called on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson to intervene after state and federal agencies issued key permits to the project developers, a process 10 years in the making. This was despite a state review finding that it would have “significant and unavoidable adverse impacts” on Yakama historic sites and culturally significant plants.

The 700-acre hydro storage project is slated to be built on the contaminated grounds of an abandoned aluminum smelter formerly owned by Lockheed Martin, and, more broadly, a site that has long encroached on a sacred Yakama site called Pushpum, meaning the “Mother of all roots.”

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2026/05/25/repub/going-green-now-for-who-yakama-protest-clean-energy-project-on-sacred-site-to-power-data-center/