This black bear was spotted by passengers on Seattle City Light’s boat, the Cascadian, as it crossed Diablo Lake. Photo courtesy of Steve Hall.

Skagit Hydroelectric Project visitor Steve Hall shared this photo of the first black bear spotted this season during the ride across Diablo Lake on Seattle City Light’s boat, the Cascadian.

Hall described the experience this way:  

The Hall family saw the bear as we were returning from a trip to Ross Lake, where we spent Fathers’ Day and had a ceremony for my brother, Howard, who died in January from cancer.

Howard took his family to Ross Lake every summer for the past 15 years and it was clearly his favorite place on earth. He always enjoyed the boat trip on Diablo Lake and would usually stand quietly near an open window, watching the shoreline pass by. 

This time, the first time his wife Cindy and two children, Cate and John, had gone to the Lake without Howard, we saw the bear after another passenger called it out. The boat’s first mate yelled “bear!” to the captain, who immediately stopped the boat so we could all get a good look.

The bear didn’t seem to mind us at all as he slowly swaggered up the hill, and we all got great views and a great picture. Afterwards, we half-joking said that Howard must have sent the bear to tell the family that all was well, and everything was going to be all right. It was a powerful moment that we will remember all of our lives.

Thanks to all at Seattle City Light for making such a beautiful place accessible for the public to enjoy.  And of course — a special thanks to the wonderful crew of the Cascadian for stopping for us!

We’re glad you enjoyed your visit, Steve. Thanks for sharing the great photo.

Our Skagit Hydroelectric Project produces about 19 percent of the electricity our customers use. It also creates Ross, Diablo and Gorge lakes where thousands of people enjoy outdoor recreation every year, including those who take a Skagit Tour.

If you’ve got a photo or a story to share from your visit to the Skagit Hydroelectric Project or a Skagit Tour, we’d love to see and hear about them.

Artist Dan Corson’s depiction of “Sonic Bloom.”

Your Seattle City Light and Pacific Science Center started construction today on a solar-powered art installation at the science center called Sonic Bloom.

Artist Dan Corson is installing five flowers up to 33 feet tall that will glow when the sun shines through the petals during the day and light up at night. Each is equipped with solar panels that will power the lighting along with additional solar panels on the roof of the science center.

You can watch the announcement here.

“It is exciting to showcase solar electricity generation and utilization in ways that go beyond what is normally expected of solar projects,” Corson said. “I am excited that Pacific Science Center and Seattle City Light partnered together to make this project happen and allowed me the opportunity to demonstrate my interest in merging nature and technology. I can’t wait until we all see and hear the realization of Sonic Bloom.”

Interpretive signage at the exhibition and inside Pacific Science Center will explain how solar energy works and how it is powering the flowers.

“Sonic Bloom is one way Pacific Science Center is bringing the science of sustainability to our community to help us understand options leading us to a healthier future for our planet.  By bringing art, science and education together, this project will be a teaching tool and source of inspiration for all ages for years to come,” said Bryce Seidl, Pacific Science Center’s president and CEO.

Workers bore a hole for one of the foundations for “Sonic Bloom.”

The $240,000 project is being paid for with money from Seattle City Light’s Green Up program, which supports the development of new renewable energy resources. The program sets aside some of the money collected from participants to promote awareness of renewable energy.

“Sonic Bloom is a great opportunity to showcase in an artistic way how solar works in Seattle for the many visitors to Pacific Science Center and the neighboring Seattle Center,” City Light Conservation Resources Director Glenn Atwood said. “We hope that it also will inspire people to consider how they might incorporate renewable energy into their homes or businesses.”  

Sonic Bloom also is another example of how renewable energy investments are building the green economy and creating jobs in Washington. The 270 custom solar panels that will power Sonic Bloom are being made in Marysville by Silicon Energy.

Workers set rebar for one of the “Sonic Bloom” foundations.

Seattle City Light is the 10th largest public electric utility in the United States. It has some of the lowest cost customer rates of any urban utility, providing reliable, renewable and environmentally responsible power to nearly 1 million Seattle area residents.  City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005, the first electric utility in the nation to achieve that distinction.

The not-for-profit Pacific Science Center celebrated 50 years of discovery in October, 2012. Looking ahead to the decades to come, the Science Center is committed to repairing and refreshing its own historic campus so it can continue to inspire for generations to come while also increasing the public’s understanding of environmentally sustainable options in their own lives and homes.

Dan Corson is a prolific public artist and sculptor who served as Seattle City Light’s first artist in residence for the utility’s 1% for the Arts program. He holds a master of fine arts degree in sculpture from the University of Washington, was a Skowhegan Scholar at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a Pilchuck Scholar at the Pilchuck Glass School. He created “Wave Rave Cave” under the Alaskan Way Viaduct for City Light in 2002 and “Rain Drum Courtyard” at the Cedar River Watershed Visitors Center in North Bend in 2001.

City Light General Manager and CEO Jorge Carrasco

Seattle City Light General Manager and CEO Jorge Carrasco received the American Public Power Association’s (APPA) Alan H. Richardson Statesmanship Award at the Association’s national conference in Nashville, Tenn., today.  The award recognizes public power leaders who work successfully and tirelessly on APPA’s behalf forging consensus on national issues that achieve public power’s goals.

“For almost a decade, Jorge has been an active participant in APPA — most recently making key contributions to APPA’s CEO Task Force on Generation Policy and Climate Change,” APPA President and CEO Mark Crisson said. “As an active member of that group and in his role as Chair of the Large Public Power Council, he has shown exemplary leadership and has played a key role in helping public power find consensus on many key policy issues.”

Carrasco is active in a wide variety of industry and related organizations, including the Electric Power Research Institute, the Alliance to Save Energy, the Alliance Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy, the American Water Works Association and the Nature Conservancy.

Carrasco is a past chair of the Large Public Power Council. In that capacity, he worked to assure a collaborative, harmonious relationship between APPA and LPPC.  He is a former city manager of Austin, Texas, and Scottsdale, Ariz.

“I am honored to be selected by APPA for this award,” Carrasco said. “No one person can achieve consensus on important issues. It takes many people who are willing to identify common ground and work toward shared goals. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with many bright, energetic people who are committed to the values of public power.”

Seattle City Light volunteers on the Marblemount Community Center renovations included Jerry Larsen, Byron Digrazia, Pat Buller, Kathy Hunter and Jim Hunter.

Skagit County is more than just a beautiful place to work for many of Seattle City Light’s employees at the Skagit Hydroelectric Project. It’s also home.

One example of their longstanding involvement in their community is the Marblemount Community Center, which has been revitalized by major renovations thanks to the work of Kathy Hunter, a City Light administrative specialist, and her husband, Jim, a maintenance laborer.

“The center has a fresh, new look after all of the work they put into it,” said Bob Hopfield, who lives in nearby Newhalem and works for the Washington Department of Transportation as a maintenance technician.

The center was built in 1956, when then-City Light employee Bill Newby and resident Merv Peterson bought the cedar, harvested the logs and made the siding shakes for construction as a donation to the community.

Volunteer Jim Hunter completes another maintenance project at the Marblemount Community Center.

The community center has hosted countless dances, receptions, birthday parties and anniversaries as a focal point for community gatherings. But over the five decades that followed its construction, the building began to deteriorate. Paint chipped, cracked and faded. Floors were scuffed, scraped and scratched. Kitchen equipment broke down. The center gathered dust and dirt in all its nooks and crannies.

Rather than a place of community pride, the Marblemount Community Center became a spot of neglect. Worse yet, the condition of the center — the designated official Red Cross shelter for Marblemount and the neighboring towns of Rockport and Newhalem – raised questions about its ability to provide safe shelter when needed in an emergency.

“It was in such shambles, nobody wanted to use it,” Kathy Hunter said.

It pained the Hunters to see the center just rotting away, so they decided to get involved and find a way to help.

The Hunters joined the Marblemount Community Board in 2008, a 10-member panel that was down to only one other member at the time. Their first proposal was to seek grant funding for a kitchen remodel at the community center.

Winning two grants from the Department of Ecology started a turnaround for the building.

“I never thought I could do something like that,” Kathy Hunter said. “I was amazed.”

Today, the kitchen has been remodeled, the floors have been refinished, a generator has been installed and the center has a fresh coat of paint donated by City Light. The Hunters, other City Light employees and community members who turned all the ideas and dreams for the center into a reality volunteered their time outside of work to help renovate the center.

Improvements have made the community center a hub for activities such as community fundraisers, family gatherings and more once again.

“The salmon barbeque fundraiser is held there, several Christmas bazaars, Halloween get-togethers and other community events,” Hopfield said. “They re-vamped the whole kitchen, attracting a lot more people to the center to be used.”

But the Hunters are looking to do even more to enhance the building. They are trying to recruit additional members for the board and volunteers for fix up projects. And they’re always looking for donations, which can be a particular challenge.

While the Marblemount Community Board is recognized as a nonprofit organization, the specific type of status does not enable tax deductions for individuals and businesses that make donations.

“One lumber yard could not donate to us, even though they really wanted to, because of our non-profit status,” Kathy Hunter said.

Such challenges, though, seem small compared to what has already been accomplished and the Hunters look forward to working with others in their community to make the center a place to be proud of for years to come.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, Seattle City Light General Manager Jorge Carrasco, City Councilmember Mike O’Brien, Bill Campbell from Equilibrium Capital, and Bullitt Foundation President Denis Hayes discuss new innovative energy conservation funding plan.

For the first time, an electric utility is testing a 20-year model to purchase metered energy efficiency savings. The agreement between Seattle City Light and the Bullitt Foundation is designed to make deep energy efficiency in new and existing commercial buildings economically feasible.

The pilot program builds on 100 years of leadership and innovation at Seattle City Light, which has long led the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

“This is a great partnership between the City and the private sector to encourage energy efficiency,” said Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. “I hope this project can serve as a model for others to save money, reduce energy usage, and cut our carbon emissions.”

“This is one of the most innovative solutions I’ve seen,” said Seattle City Light General manager and CEO Jorge Carrasco. ”We want to try it because we think the approach could help harvest deep energy efficiency in buildings and do it in a way in which everyone wins.  Ratepayers get more comfortable buildings, investors see a positive return, and the utility delays new power plants and reduces its carbon emissions,” he added.

Very few building owners now make the large, long-term investments needed to achieve “deep” savings of 35 to 50 percent. Yet the rates of return on such investments would be attractive to utilities and other investors that have access to cheap, long-term capital. The new pilot program aims to overcome this obstacle.

“We often hear that building owners want to make their buildings more efficient, but getting the right return on investment, in the right timeframe, can be difficult. This innovative new approach to financing energy efficiency could help spur the type of investments in deep green buildings that we need to meet the carbon reduction goals outlined in our Climate Action Plan,” said City Councilmember Mike O’Brien, Chair of the Energy & Environment Committee. “With a utility only paying for efficiencies that actually materialize and investors getting a reliable return, we are excited by the possibilities that this financing model creates,” he added.

The Bullitt Center was chosen to test this new model based on its participation in the City of Seattle’s Living Building Pilot Program, which was designed in part to encourage ultra-efficient green buildings.

There are two keys to the model: An energy efficiency meter to objectively measure real-time energy savings and a 20-year contract between a utility and energy efficiency investors.

The energy efficiency meter measures the energy savings and allows it to be sold as it occurs. This meter was developed by EnergyRM, with support from OR BEST and the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), a non-profit that works with regional utilities to prove out new, energy-efficient technologies.

“Partnering with Seattle City Light, NEEA and others on this project will create better integration of information between industry, utilities, building owners and investors,” stated Rob Harmon, CEO of EnergyRM.

A 20-year contract with a utility allows an investor to profitably invest in energy efficiency upgrades with longer payback times, squeezing more efficiency out of the building. And because the contract is with a utility, the opportunity is appealing to long-term investors who are not necessarily the owners of the building. This means outside capital can be profitably invested in efficiency without relying on a building owner’s ability to secure a loan.

“If adopted nationally, this could be a trillion dollar game changer,” said Denis Hayes, CEO of the Bullitt Foundation. “By separating the efficiency investor from the building owner, just as we separate the wind farm developer from the rancher whose property the turbines are on, we can reduce the energy use in most existing buildings by more than 40 percent. I know lots of investors who would be delighted to get a safe, consistent return for 20 years while reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he added.

While the pilot program is testing this new model in one building – the Bullitt Center – it could be scaled to work for any utility.

About Seattle City Light

Seattle City Light is the 10^th-largest public electric utility in the United States. It has some of the lowest cost customer rates of any urban utility, providing reliable, renewable and environmentally responsible power to nearly 1 million Seattle-area residents. City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005, the first electric utility in the nation to achieve that distinction. More information at: http://www.seattle.gov/light/

About the Bullitt Foundation

The Bullitt Foundation is a charitable foundation that works to safeguard the natural environment by promoting responsible human activities and sustainable communities in the Pacific Northwest. The Foundation is the owner of the Bullitt Center, the greenest commercial building in the world. More information about the Foundation at www.bullitt.org and the Bullitt Center at www.bullittcenter.org.

City Light’s Greg Carlson in Oklahoma.

We might be far from tornado country in Washington state, but that’s not keeping a Seattle City Light employee from offering a safety-gloved helping hand.

Greg Carlson, a City Light field operations supervisor, is currently in Moore, Okla., helping to clean up the damage caused a mega-tornado that devastated the region on May 20. The tornado killed 23 people and injured 377.

Carlson and other volunteers are cutting trees and removing debris from playgrounds, businesses, and other structures.

“There is heavy damage to homes as well as the hospital and a large bowling alley,” Carlson wrote to co-workers during a break in his work. “Yesterday we were at the 7-11 site where four people were killed.”

Greg has experience with this type of work. He volunteered in 2012 to assist the people of West Liberty, Ky., a community that was also largely destroyed by a tornado.

Since 1992, Greg has saved up and used his vacation time to help people in need, using his construction skills to fix houses, build shelters, dig wells and anything else that needs a skilled hand.

Greg has volunteered in 20 different countries and all over the U.S. He and his fellow volunteers pay for their own travel and bring their own tools and equipment.

In Oklahoma, Greg and his team came equipped with 14 chainsaws and other tools for clearing trees, lumber, and blocks.

The celebration, marking the beginning of the fishing season, seeks to honor and protect the tribe’s fishing fleet. After a seafood feast of salmon, halibut, crab, prawns, mussels and clams, representatives from the Catholic, Shaker and Pentacostal faiths said blessings over the remains of four wild chinook salmon from the Skagit River.

The fish were wrapped in cedar boughs and carried by young men from the tribe. Following the ceremony, the young men and tribal fishermen released the salmon to all four directions.

Swinomish tribe members harvest salmon and steelhead from the Skagit River where Seattle City Light operates three hydroelectric dams that produce about 20 percent of the utility’s power. City Light works closely with tribal staff on flow management for the river and fish habitat restoration activities as part of the utility’s operating license for the dams.

Other invited witnesses were Billy Frank Jr., chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission; Shirley Soloman, Executive Director of the Skagit Watershed Council; and Pat Pattillo from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Frank, a Nisqually tribal member, is one of the best known American Indian environmental leaders in the Pacific Northwest. He is best known for his grassroots campaign for fishing rights on the Nisqually River in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also known for promoting cooperative management of natural resources.

Tribes reserved the right to fish, hunt and gather shellfish in treaties with the U.S. government negotiated in the mid-1850s. But when tribal members tried to exercise those rights off-reservation they were arrested for fishing in violation of state law.

Frank was arrested more than 50 times in the Fish Wars of the 1960s and 1970s because of his intense dedication to the treaty fishing rights cause. The tribal struggle was taken to the courts in U.S. v. Washington, and Judge George Hugo Boldt found in favor of the Indians in 1974. The Boldt Decision established the 20 treaty Indian tribes in western Washington as co-managers of the salmon resource with the State of Washington and re-affirmed the tribal right to half of the harvestable salmon returning to Western Washington.

You can watch a video of the May 16 event here.

US Rep. Suzan DelBene, Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin, and Darrington District Ranger Peter Forbes join Seattle City Light Natural Resources and Environmental Planning Manager Colleen McShane at the trail ribbon cutting.

A new 1.5 mile loop trail along the Sauk River near Darrington is now available thanks to Seattle City Light funding that is part of the utility’s license to operate the Skagit Hydroelectric Project.

The new trail, located just off the popular Mountain Loop Highway, is ADA accessible and connects to the longer Old Sauk River Trail.

Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest District Ranger Peter Forbes of the US Forest Service, Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin, and Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) opened the trail with a ribbon-cutting ceremony May 25.

The settlement agreement for the Skagit Hydroelectric Project’s license includes a program to support recreational opportunities within North Cascades National Park and the Skagit Wild and Scenic River System. Some of that funding was used by the Forest Service to design and build the trail.

Boundary Dam Rescue Team members Jeff MacArthur, Randy Holter, Brad Larson and Larry “Bear” Holter.

Seattle City Light’s Boundary Dam Rescue Squad got to test their skills in real life on Sunday, May 26, when they came to the aid of a group of boaters whose canoe capsized in the swollen Pend Oreille River.

The Pend Oreille Sheriff’s Office received a call of a boating accident at 9 a.m. An aluminum canoe with three passengers had tipped over in the historic Metaline Falls, a narrow and fast part of the river flanked by high cliffs.

Brad Larson, senior warehouser at Boundary, leader of the Boundary Rescue Squad and a member of the Pend Oreille County Fire Protection District No.  2 volunteer fire department, responded to a page shortly after the incident. He rounded up Ironworker Randy Holter and Machinist Crew Chief Larry ”Bear” Holter, two other members of the squad, and his wife Liz Larson, who also serves with the fire department.

The four, along with boat operator Jeff Macarthur, a hydro maintenance worker, rode to the accident location. They found two women and a man shivering near the river bank, back in their canoe after being assisted by another private boat that arrived minutes earlier.  The three boaters, who wore life vests, spent about 20 minutes in 56-degree water before getting to shore.

“We made sure everybody was accounted for, then got them on the boat and brought them over to the recreational area near the dam, where they met with an ambulance,” Brad Larson said. “They all had a case of mild hypothermia, but they didn’t need to be transported to the hospital.”

It was a good ending to a dangerous experience. The Pend Oreille River is currently flowing at 70,000 cubic feet per second, nearly at full flood stage. By comparison, the daytime flow at Niagara Falls is about 100,000 cubic feet per second.

City Light maintains and trains a specialized rescue team to allow the utility to respond to emergencies on or near Boundary Dam, and to aid the Pend Oreille County authorities with water and high-angle rope rescues. The 12-member team consists of Larson, Randy and Bear Holter, Jeff Young, Rick Reiber, Dan Smith, Jonathan Currey, Gary Johnson, Mitch Langley, Jared Campbell, David Cox and Marcus Wright.

In 2010, City Light crews installaed a Bailey Bridge over Babcock Creek at the Skagit Hydroelectric Project to restore an access road that had been washed out.

Bailey Bridges are made of steel trusses in small sections that are bolted together on site. They are named after the designer of the first prototype, Donald Bailey, a civil service officer in the British War Office during World War II.