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Democracy Vouchers Are a Bargain Jul 06, 2025

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With a miniscule portion of the city's budget, democracy vouchers deliver a whopping impact.
The program's funding is up for renewal this August, and it's a great deal. The renewal budget, $4.5 million per year in property taxes, is just 0.053 percent of the city's $8.5 billion 2025 budget. Renewal is an even smaller proportion of the budget than the original 2015 levy (which you also needed a magnifying glass to see).
That's a pretty amazing price for the program's benefits. I've already covered how democracy vouchers:
empower tens of thousands more residents to support local candidates they believe in;
cultivate a more representative donor pool;
reduce the flow of out-of-state and big-dollar donations;
and encourage more diverse candidates to run, connect with voters, and win office.
It's delivering real bang for the buck. The democracy voucher renewal cost can still be referred to as "budget dust," as was the original 2015 levy. What's more, that miniscule proportion of the total budget will continue to shrink as the city's budget grows (which it's done every year) and the levy rate stays constant. Over the course of its first nine years, the $3 million democracy voucher levy compressed from an already-tiny 0.059 percent of the 2016 city budget to 0.038 percent in 2024.
The Democracy Voucher Program is at least as worthwhile as many other similarly priced items in the city's 2025 budget. Among them are:
three months of public golf course maintenance and programs;
half of the annual funds for technology investments in construction and inspections;
fewer than three weeks of park maintenance;
eight weeks of debt service payments;
and four months of benefits management for retired employees.
What does the levy mean for individual property owners? The tax rate in the proposition is $2.27 per $1,000 of assessed value in the first year, representing an additional tax rate of $0.015 per $1,000 from the existing funding rate. That comes to about $13.07 per year for a median-priced house, according to the SEEC - about a $4 per year increase, or even less when accounting for inflation.
In other words, for an annual household cost less than the price of a single movie ticket, Seattleites can continue to reshape a fundamental part of their democracy.
In 2015, the Honest Elections campaign set the program funding levy at $3 million per year. That turned out to be a pretty good estimate of what it would take to launch and run democracy vouchers for Seattle, and it's kept the program solvent for its first ten years. Spending fluctuates year to year, of course (Seattle's elections are in odd-numbered years, so that's when the bulk of the costs come through), and unused funds from one year roll over to support costs in the next.
Administrators at the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), the entity that runs the program, estimated what it will take to fund another decade of democracy vouchers and determined that the program needs a slight increase from the past rate to keep going. With years of data behind them, they could better guess how to account for differing numbers of candidates and residents using the program.
It's true that a lot of Seattleites still don't use their vouchers, letting them languish on a forgotten shelf. But neither the original program designers (including Sightline) nor the SEEC expect 100 percent of Seattle residents to hand in vouchers; total participation is neither the program's success metric nor the budgeting baseline. They know that campaign finance reform is a tough nut to crack, and there will always be people who don't engage politically in that way.
Still, the current level of voucher dollars flowing in is impressive - enough to fund the bulk of participating candidates' campaigns and place Seattle as having one of the top, if not the highest, contributor rates of all US cities. What's more, most city candidates have opted into the program, just as the architects of the program hoped...

In Seattle Elections, Dark Money Follows Competition, Not Democracy Vouchers Jul 06, 2025

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Critics of Seattle's democracy vouchers often point to one trend as evidence of the program's fallibility: a rise in local "independent expenditures." That is, dark money campaign funding vehicles like super PACs. Despite their upsides, critics say, vouchers have simply pushed millions of big-donor dollars from official campaigns into less transparent and accountable forms, rendering the program a waste of money.
Sightline led the design of the Democracy Voucher Program and has promoted and studied it for more than a decade. So, I wanted to check this accusation - and found it unwarranted.
Independent expenditures are up in many cities across the United States, democracy vouchers or not. And preliminary academic analysis controlling for other factors confirms the program has had no effect on this kind of outside spending.
Instead, Seattle's experience shows that this innovative public financing model is delivering on its promise of more people-powered elections - even if US laws hamstring the city's options for addressing every dark money dollar.
From the inception of the program, opponents raised fears of spending from outside groups - special interests not affiliated with official campaigns. The 2015 opposition statement against I-122 (the ballot initiative that created the program), for example, suggested that it, quote: "pushes more money into less accountable independent expenditures, which I-122 does nothing to limit or reform," end-quote. Recent news articles continue to reference the explosion of independent expenditures as the flip side of an otherwise markedly successful endeavor.
It's true that the city (and its voucher program) cannot limit this type of spending, although it can and has taken some steps to curtail or highlight certain offenders, such as banning foreign-influenced corporations from political spending and strengthening transparency and disclosure laws. Independent expenditures are dollars from interest groups that are explicitly prohibited from coordinating with candidate campaigns (hence the "independent" moniker). These entities can be political action committees (PACs), super PACs, or other "dark money" groups, which all have unlimited spending but different allowances on the funding they can accept.
The US Supreme Court prohibited limitations on such spending as far back as Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. It then kicked the door wide open for corporate spending in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, giving wealthy individuals and groups carte blanche to sway elections. And research shows that these funds do influence at least some policies.
It's also true that independent expenditures have risen in Seattle in recent years. But that doesn't mean they've grown because of the voucher program.
To test the allegation that the voucher program pushed political dollars out of official campaigns and into the "dark money" arena, Sightline turned to the leading independent US scholar of the program, Professor Jennifer Heerwig of SUNY-Stony Brook. Her research casts doubt on the claim, showing that independent expenditures have increased in many cities in recent years - some much more dramatically than in Seattle.
Independent expenditures, increasingly from ideological super PACs, have exploded in US politics over the past decade, including infiltrating local elections in the years directly following the 2010 Citizens United decision. Contributions to super PACs grew more than 30-fold from $40.1 million in 2012 to $1.3 billion in 2024, according to one report. According to another, spending doubled from 2020 to 2024 alone. Notably, these dollars are difficult to track, and reported figures likely under-estimate the growth.
Seattle and other nearby cities are not immune to this trend, nor is Seattle uniquely vulnerable to these outside campaigns. To study whether Seattle's independent expenditures increase bore any connection with the city's democracy vouchers, Professor Heerwig and researcher Anna Campbell collecte...

The 1,083-Page Environmental Assessment That Ignores Climate Change and Tribes Jul 06, 2025

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In 2023, Washington state legislators attempted to make it easier to build long-distance power lines. Recognizing that more wires are essential to reaching 100 percent clean electricity - and that, quote: "transmission projects take a decade or more to develop and permit" end-quote, lawmakers directed a state agency to preemptively analyze the environmental impact of these projects.
More specifically, legislators tasked the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (or EFSEC) with preparing a so-called "programmatic environmental impact statement" (or PEIS) for hypothetical large transmission lines. The PEIS's purpose is to evaluate possible environmental harms of transmission lines and identify ways to mitigate them before specific project proposals to facilitate more responsible and quicker project completion. Sightline supported the idea.
In March 2025, EFSEC dropped its draft assessment with a virtual thud. Spanning 1,083 pages, the PEIS catalogs dozens of possible impacts of transmission line projects, largely drawn from Washington's State Environmental Policy Act (or SEPA) rules. It is mind-bendingly comprehensive, assessing impacts ranging from the environmental (like soil erosion and habitat loss) to the economic (such as changes in home value) to the faintly absurd (for example "Physical Hazard to Aerial Recreation Enthusiasts").
EFSEC analyzed 72 impacts across three project phases (construction, operations and maintenance, and upgrades and maintenance) for both overhead and underground lines. To save you the math, that's 432 distinct assessments.
But nowhere in its 1,083 pages does the PEIS analyze how transmission lines would affect the biggest environmental issue of our day: climate change.
EFSEC isn't entirely to blame. The legislature directed the agency to focus on "significant adverse environmental impacts" of electric transmission facilities. Climate change does not obviously fit into this definition. (Though arguably, neither does aerial recreation.) And to be fair, the document does explain, in a two-page Purpose & Needs section, that "existing constraints on transmission capacity within the state already present challenges in ensuring adequate and affordable supplies of clean electricity."
But by failing to assess how expanding the grid would reduce climate pollution, these 1,083 pages leave decisionmakers without the full picture they need to weigh the trade-offs of critical clean energy infrastructure.
Even though the draft PEIS only tells half the story, it does offer one clear takeaway: stringing up wires can be, by and large, not hugely environmentally harmful, and most harms can be mitigated through careful planning, site selection, and design.
EFSEC rates each possible impact on a scale ranging from "nil" to "high." It then offers mitigation techniques that the agency says would bring the impact determination to a "less than significant level."
Before even applying mitigation measures, roughly a third of the total 432 assessments received a rating of "low," "nil," "negligible," or "not applicable." Public health and safety, recreation, energy and natural resources, and earth (such as soil erosion or compaction) are most likely to fall into this category. (Aerial recreation enthusiasts will be happy to know that they, too, land in this group.)
EFSEC also finds that with smart design and siting choices, most remaining possible impacts could be negligible or low. Two-thirds of the assessments received a rating with an impact range that includes low, nil, or negligible (for example: "low to high," or "negligible to moderate").
Of the 432 assessments, just four received a rating of at least "moderate" before mitigation. All four concerned Tribal cultural resources.
That tribal resources are the most likely to be affected by power lines makes another omission by EFSEC even more glaring than the climate one: the agency failed to consult with most Tribes before it released the draft PEIS.
The legislature e...

Oregon’s Zoning Reforms Are Working, But They Need Some Upgrades Jun 16, 2025

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Six years after a monumental rezone, Governor Kotek's HB-2138 will fill the gaps to more fully legalize starter homes.
Almost six years after Oregon became the first state to re-legalize duplexes, fourplexes, and cottage clusters throughout urban areas, the effects have arrived.
From Gresham to Grants Pass, permits are being pulled, roof beams are rising, and first-time homebuyers are signing their closing papers. Policymakers in Oregon and elsewhere, meanwhile, have their own opportunity: learning lessons.
Oregon's 2019 state-level reform to low-density zoning turned out to be the leading edge of a wave that has since rolled to California, Maine, Vermont, Arizona, Washington, and Montana, with various cities initiating similar reforms in their own right. But through it all, some sympathetic analysts have asked: Is this reform actually worth the trouble? Is the juice worth the squeeze? And if it is, which details do we need to worry about getting right?
Well, the proof is in the permits. Oregon cities are now several years past the state's deadline for legalizing so-called "middle housing." And though it's still too soon to say exactly how big a deal these smaller home options will prove to be over the long term, the data suggests they do have potential. Most notably, within three years of legalization in Portland, they accounted for 26 percent of new residential units approved there.
Another lesson: The finer details of zoning reform definitely seem to matter. As Oregon lawmakers consider a new law, House Bill 2138, that would build on the state's 2019 bill, here are some of the takeaways so far from the outcomes of the first one.
1. Zoning reforms take time to pay off - but they can!
In a thoughtful 2024 law review article, housing advocate Brian Connolly succinctly named one of the key "structural roadblocks" to middle housing getting built: "the absence of a middle-housing building industry."
Connolly is right. You can't build a business on something that's illegal, and fourplexes have been illegal in most of North America for 70 years. Therefore, the middle-housing building industry is very small.
The good news is that in Portland, entrepreneurs have been changing that. It just took them a few years.
After a lackluster first year, production of newly legal homes in Portland quadrupled in years 2 and 3.
The year 3 total of 400 new homes per year isn't a lot in the context of a city with 300,000 homes. But, crucially, this rapid growth has been happening in Portland even in the face of a three percent population decline over four years and a huge slowdown in local apartment building. By year 3 after Portland's reforms, those 400 homes actually accounted for 26 percent of all housing permits citywide.
The main reason these homes are so popular even in a relatively cool market is probably that they have been able to come to market at much, much lower prices than homes on their own lots. The newly built middle housing homes average $300,000 less than single-detached houses:
What does it mean that this previously obscure category of the housing market has been able to grow so quickly amid a homebuilding slump? At least two things:
A lot of Portlanders would like to live in relatively small homes that are not in apartment buildings, but regulations previously prevented those homes from being built, so there was a lot of pent-up demand.
Even after Oregon re-legalized these homes, it took a few years for people in the industry to figure out how to build homes like that.
Eric Thompson, a former McMansion developer, told me in 2022 that he'd retooled his business away from building only for the richest five percent and was now signing deeds over to school-teachers and restaurant managers, people who never thought they'd be able to afford new construction. His firm, Oregon Homeworks, became one of the first to jump into this market and immediately started turning a profit. He said,
"For those of us in the know, Portland has the mo...

How to Talk About Parking Reform - and Win Jun 03, 2025

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Our road-tested messaging guide to gain more great neighborhoods and the homes we need, and to kick excess asphalt to the curb.
Parking policy shapes our lives. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Today's rules chronically overprescribe far more parking than people really need. Parking is systematically overbuilt - by law.
First, you'll begin to notice the vast stretches of empty pavement in your city or town, even in the busiest downtown areas. Wastelands of asphalt, right where something more useful or pleasant or needed could be: a tree, a garden, a preschool's play yard, apartments for people who work nearby. Once you're parking pilled, you'll see more and more places in your community where buildings are small islands in the middle of concrete seas, where pavement dominates the landscape, and where big box chain stores and highway-like "main drags" have eroded what used to be the particular local feel of a place. Mile after mile of characterless, cookie-cutter sprawl.
And what parking policy impacts you don't see, you 'experience.'
Parking rules play a sizable role in where people live, how much it costs, and how they get around. All that paved space is expensive. Building parking costs lots of money. The wasted space and added costs are passed on to renters and buyers. And when overbuilt parking simply won't fit on a lot or eats up too much of the project budget, housing simply doesn't get built, worsening the housing shortage. When there aren't enough homes, competition for what's available drives up home prices and rents. Same for small businesses and community services: mandates to overbuild parking can make or break a project, from a mom-and-pop cafe to a daycare.
But we don't have to do it this way! We can have nice things! We can have more homes in a housing shortage. We can have more daycares in a childcare shortage. We can have more trees and fewer heat islands. We can have inviting neighborhoods where homes and businesses are close by and it's pleasant and safe for everybody, from kids to seniors, to stroll with friends, walk the dog, or window shop.
Lifting the one-size-fits-all parking mandates ubiquitous in most city code books today can give businesses, homebuilders, and property owners the flexibility to have the parking they need without wasteful, costly overbuilding. It's a win-win-win - for people, places, and our pocketbooks - to right-size the amount of parking to the specific site, use, and location of new homes, renovated buildings, or new businesses.
Of course, these wins aren't always obvious. If you asked a random person on the street whether they'd like more or less parking, most would probably say more. North Americans default to a driver's perspective, not necessarily a pedestrian's or a parent's or a sidewalk cafe patron's. It's for good reason; we often have no other choice but to drive. We're locked in. But when you point out that cities demand more space for parking than the community needs and then tick through the ways that excess costs us all, it quickly looks like common sense for most people that we should use that space for things we want, not for more empty pavement. And it makes sense to most everyone that we should dial the amount of parking to what's right for the site.
So how do we move people from the driver's default to a broader view? One that comprises the costs of too much parking and the possibilities beyond it? How do we toggle from "where to park" to "how we live in this place"?
Alongside our partners, including Welcoming Neighbors Network and Parking Reform Network, Sightline Institute has undertaken public opinion polling and qualitative message testing both across the United States and within the Cascadia region, along with on-the-ground experimentation in a handful of local and state efforts, to compile messaging guidelines for lawmakers and advocates working to reform parking rules. Winning parking reform means winning so many other things too: more of the ho...

Six Reasons Seattle-ites Should Be Proud of Their Democracy Vouchers Jun 03, 2025

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A decade in, and up for renewal in August, Seattle's model campaign funding program has blasted past even its ambitious initial goals.
Money doesn't always win elections. But it sure does help.
And Cascadia's biggest city has a proven tool that democratizes who gives to city-level candidates: democracy vouchers. The program is now ten years old and has been through enough election cycles to tell if it's working as intended.
The conclusion? This program is crushing its goals.
It has unlocked
"an incredible explosion of participation"
of people giving to candidates, in the words of researcher Dr. Jennifer Heerwig of Stonybrook University (who, with coauthor Brian McCabe of Georgetown University, wrote the actual book on Seattle's democracy voucher program). The people who donate to Seattle campaigns are now a much more diverse slice of the city's population than they used to be. Big-dollar and out-of-city campaign contributions have fallen dramatically.
And it's fundamentally changed how candidates approach running for office. No longer spending all their time dialing for dollars, candidates instead visit potential "donors" - regular Seattle residents - door to door, collecting vouchers, small-dollar donations, and ideas for what the people of Seattle care about most. Since the program began, Seattle voters have been able to choose from a greater variety of candidates and seen more competition between people running. That's increased the accountability of officeholders and the transparency of elections: both wins for local democracy.
After ten years, the miniscule property tax levy that funds the program is expiring, and Seattle voters have an opportunity to renew it in August's primary election.
Ten years of democracy vouchers
When Seattle voters first adopted democracy vouchers in 2015 as part of a broader package of good governance and transparency reforms, democracy vouchers were a new idea and a break from other public financing designs that mostly offer matching funds or grants.
Under the program (of which- full disclosure- Sightline Institute was the principal designer), Seattle residents receive four $25 vouchers for each election cycle. They can donate the vouchers to qualifying candidates, who redeem them for money from the city. Participating candidates pledge to abide by contribution and spending limits, disclose their finances, and take part in a certain number of public forums. Since residents don't have to spend any of their own money to donate to candidates, the program has made political giving accessible to everyone.
The program now covers all city races and has an online option in addition to the original paper vouchers. It's benefited from a certain degree of administrative flexibility: the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), which oversees the program, has made tweaks over the years in response to feedback from candidates and others to ensure its continued viability and use. The SEEC's management also holds campaigns that use the program more accountable, since the office tracks other campaign finances too.
Candidates and Seattle-ites have now used the program in six election cycles, and researchers have evaluated its effectiveness each time - recording just how much it's opened up the Emerald City's systems of democracy. This program has multiplied the number of everyday Seattle-ites who give to campaigns; elevated city residents over out-of-town donors; transitioned the bulk of campaign funds to come from small donations rather than large gifts; encouraged more Seattle-ites to vote; and fundamentally changed who runs for office and how they connect with voters.
Here are six reasons Seattle-ites can be proud of Democracy Vouchers:
1. More people in Seattle now give to city candidates than do people anywhere else
Before the democracy voucher program, Seattle's elections were overwhelmingly funded by rich white people who live in houses with great views. A tiny 1.5 percent of Seattle adults gav...

How Washington State Won Parking Reform May 18, 2025

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Lessons and strategies for parking flexibility advocates elsewhere.
Last week, Governor Bob Ferguson's signature made it official: Washington has passed the strongest statewide rollback of costly parking mandates in the United States. The bill does many things, but put simply, it means that in most places across the state, onerous parking requirements will no longer limit the homes and businesses that Washingtonians need and want.
In most circumstances, the new law will restore the rights of property owners- not arbitrary, predetermined local quotas - to decide how many parking spaces they need for the homes or businesses they hope to build. This means more homes, in more shapes and sizes, to help address a deep housing shortage and help curb the resulting high home prices and rents. It means less red tape, lower costs, and less wasted space for housing and businesses in the kinds of historic main streets people love to stroll and shop and dine along. And it means undoing legal mandates that forced pollution, sprawl, and excess asphalt in cities and towns where land is scarce and opportunity costs are high.
The path to a win wasn't easy. But a few key champions, a broad coalition, and a powerful set of stories and data laid the way.
Building on years of housing conversations, Washington's parking bill enjoyed a two-year turnaround
For years, advocates in the Evergreen State have been pushing regulatory reform to tame housing costs, building relationships and growing awareness on how parking mandates contribute to the housing shortage. That said, passing such strong parking legislation was unthinkable even two years ago. A 2023 bill to end parking mandates in the tiny fraction of the state's land near transit stops squeaked through one committee but went no further.
Since then, though, advocates published more research and shared more stories on the real and present harms caused by excessive parking mandates - and the additional homes that can come from added parking flexibility: research suggests that building at reduced parking ratios, similar to the caps ultimately adopted in Washington, could make 40 percent more homes financially feasible to build over today's status quo. Alongside this growing narrative, a bigger-than-ever coalition was gathering together to elevate parking reform as a major housing priority for Washington Democrats this year.
Sponsored by superstar housing champion Senator Jessica Bateman (D, 22), the Parking Reform and Modernization Act (SB 5184) sets universal caps for both residential and commercial parking minimums and repeals them entirely for a set of key uses. It passed on strong bipartisan votes of 40-8 in the Senate and 64-31 in the House.
How did Washington move the needle in two years?
Redesigned the policy to target building types, not transit
Told real stories about why it matters
Activated a broad coalition
Leveraged local progress, garnering support from cities
Added guardrails and offramps
Consider the needs of disabled drivers
Had strong legislative champions
Washington's recipe for passing strong parking reform.
'Target sympathetic building types, not transit-limited geographies'
In the lead-up to Washington's 2023 legislative session, ending parking mandates near transit seemed to hold promise. The previous summer, Oregon adopted a suite of reforms eliminating parking mandates along transit routes and for a host of specified uses. A few months later, California passed AB-2097, which ended parking mandates within a half-mile of major transit stops.
Inspired by these wins, Washington legislators took up a bill replicating California's. Targeting reforms to places served by transit is relatively easy to justify because it gives more residents and workers the opportunity to use it, maximizing the public investment. It also neutralizes opposition from those who don't live near transit.
However, debate over the bill became overrun by concerns that transit service often isn't good e...

Washington Takes Statewide Zoning Reform to the Next Level May 18, 2025

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Lawmakers just passed groundbreaking bills on parking, TOD, and more.
There's a healthy competition brewing between states that are taking action for housing abundance. But as of May 2025, Washington leads the pack. Its legislature just passed best-in-the-US bills on both parking and transit-oriented development, along with a half-dozen other policies that address the state's housing shortage and resulting affordability crisis in several critical ways.
These wins come on the heels of Washington's legalization of co-living in 2024, middle housing and ADUs in 2023, and an array of bills passed in both years that make it easier to build the homes Washingtonians need.
There's no way to precisely quantify it, but I feel confident making the claim that Washington's cumulative legislation adds up to the most any rival state has yet done- at least for the moment, as competitors nip at Washington's heels!
I gave a preview of Washington's 2025 housing bills in a previous article. Below, I'll run through highlights that illustrate why, together with the previous years' wins, the bills passed this year elevate Washington to best in class. But first, a little more context…
A quick recap of the interstate zoning reform race
The move from local to statewide zoning reform started in California more than a decade ago in response to local government intransigence on allowing more housing. The Golden State has had some solid wins - on accessory dwelling units (ADUs, aka "backyard cottages" in particular) - but messy, high-stakes politics continue to mire progress.
Oregon leapt into the spotlight in 2019 by legalizing middle housing, followed in 2022 by major parking reform.
Washington had its "year of housing" in 2023 with a suite of bills headlined by the legalization of middle housing, and then upped the ante in 2024's "short" session.
Also in 2023, the Montana Miracle eliminated numerous barriers to more homes in Big Sky Country, notably for mixed-use apartments and ADUs. The state just pulled a repeat in 2025, passing strong parking reform and more.
Other states that have passed zoning reforms of various stripes include Colorado, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Hawaii.
If you include north of the border, British Columbia's 2023 package of reforms took the crown for all of North America and indisputably held it- until now that is, with Washington perhaps ahead by a nose! BC's transit-oriented development policy, or TOD, is stronger, but its parking reform is weaker. What's more, it hasn't yet legalized co-living or ended roommate bans like Washington has.
Washington's Housing Billapalooza 2025
SB 5184 caps and eliminates parking mandates
Parking policy IS housing policy: laws that force the construction of too much parking thwart housing by adding cost and taking up space. Parking politics are gnarly however, and before now Oregon was the only state able to enact strong parking reform.
SB 5184, or the Parking Reform and Modernization Act, works differently than Oregon's administrative reform, but it's comparably strong. And we can also add Montana to the list, where the legislature just passed a parking bill modeled closely after Washington's.
Other states - notably California - have passed incremental reforms, typically tied to transit proximity. In contrast, SB 5184 is based on the reality that parking mandates can be detrimental to housing anywhere and everywhere. As my colleague Catie Gould explains,
bill champion Senator Jessica Bateman "flipped the debate from 'WHERE should mandates apply' (geographically) to 'WHEN should mandates apply' (in what circumstances). It worked. Instead of nitpicking over transit service, the conversation shifted to, for example, whether it's okay for excessive parking mandates to prevent a new daycare or senior housing development from opening."
SB 5184 caps minimums for all multifamily buildings - that's duplexes to skyscrapers, townhomes to small apartment buildings - at 0.5 spaces per home and fully ...

A Climate Hawk's Guide to Northwest Data Centers May 18, 2025

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Data centers are the first real test of the region's climate ambitions. They might also create opportunities to achieve them.
A Sightline Special Report by Sightline's Climate and Energy Program Director Emily Moore. Published on May 14, 2025.
For a full list of sources, attributions, and appendices, as well as charts and graphics, please download the PDF version of this report at www.sightline.org.
Introduction & Executive Summary
"Northwest data centers' electricity use could more than double, imperiling climate goals."
"Data centers guzzle power, threatening WA's clean energy push."
"Energy demand from data centers growing faster than West can supply, experts say."
Reading these and other recent headlines, it would be reasonable to conclude that a few power-hungry data centers could force Oregon and Washington State to capitulate on their US-leading climate goals. Is that true?
In this report, Sightline analyzes the extent to which data centers have contributed to global warming pollution in Oregon and Washington. Further, Sightline examines how the industry's continued growth could affect the Northwest's ability to meet its ambitious commitments to transition from polluting fossil fuels to abundant clean energy.
To be sure, data centers arouse a host of concerns unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions. Worries include data centers inflating residential utility bills, the facilities' seemingly unquenchable thirst for water, and the biases in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) models that data centers increasingly power. This report does not touch on those topics, intentionally keeping a narrow focus on data centers' climate impacts.
What we found complicates typical media narratives.
Climate-warming emissions, including those from generating electricity, have dropped in both Oregon and Washington over the past decade despite data center load growth. Further, state policies prevent utilities from building new fossil fuel-generating plants in Oregon and Washington to power data centers, shielding the region from the alarming trend taking hold across the United States.
Data centers have, however, increased a handful of Northwest utilities' reliance on purchasing dirty electricity and likely slowed each state's transition to carbon-free energy. And if data centers gobble up electricity at the levels many analysts anticipate, they could push some Northwest utilities to rely on power from gas and coal burned in neighboring states with weaker environmental regulations for decades longer than they would have otherwise.
Still, the current spotlight on data centers' power consumption obscures the even greater electricity demand - from cars, buildings, and industry - that will follow if decarbonization goes according to plan.
Northwest leaders can transform today's challenge meeting data centers' demand for electricity into an opportunity to accelerate an economy-wide clean energy transition, drawing from tech companies' deep pockets to help pay for it. They can speed build-out of the electric grid to unlock everyone's access to the cheapest solar and wind power; make it easier for tech companies to invest in clean energy innovation; lift obsolete limits on data center operators sourcing clean resources; and transform data centers from passive energy hogs into active grid participants - and maybe even grid assets. All the while, leaders can work to make Northwest data centers the cleanest in the world.
Data centers are the first test of the Northwest's climate ambitions. How leaders respond may chart the course for the rest of the economy's clean energy transition.
Chapter 1: Baseline.
Northwest data centers' climate record.
Low taxes and cheap power attract data centers to the Northwest
Data centers have dotted the Northwest for decades. For example, the Westin Building Exchange, a data center in downtown Seattle, began leasing its server space to tech companies in 2001. In 2006, Google opened its first data center in The Dalles, Or...

Northwest Data Centers: A Climate Test and Potential Opportunity May 15, 2025

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A Sightline report finds that - with the right policies - the region could harness data center demand for clean power to decarbonize the broader economy.
Each week seems to bring a new warning about a looming, unprecedented surge in electricity demand in the Northwest, with data centers largely to blame. Tech companies, with their seemingly insatiable appetite for power, appear to be blowing the region off its climate course. Meanwhile, stories from other parts of the country offer cautionary tales - like in Tennessee, where Elon Musk's A.I. data center, powered by unregulated gas turbines, is now one of the biggest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in majority-Black and already heavily-polluted Shelby County.
Sightline's newest report, A Climate Hawk's Guide to Northwest Data Centers, helps climate- minded policymakers and advocates contextualize and make sense of these warnings. It focuses specifically on the data center industry's energy consumption and resulting climate impacts rather than its non-climate effects, such as rising residential electricity rates or water use (these issues have been extensively covered by other groups).
Sightline's analysis offers some reassurance to the climate-concerned reader, while acknowledging the further strain demand data centers will place on our grid - a grid already trying to support a massive shift to electrification for our cars, buildings, and industry over the coming decades.
Rather than pushing data centers to regions of the country with dirtier electricity sources and weaker environmental protections than the Northwest, policymakers in Oregon and Washington could enlist data center corporations in accelerating the broader economy's transition to abundant clean energy. Sightline's latest report names four opportunities, with an eye to mechanisms that balance the realities of corporate interests in siting and profiting from data centers here with the climate-forward values that voters in Oregon and Washington have supported time and again.
Understandably, not everyone wants to see data centers set up shop in the Northwest. But most climate advocates do hope to see demand for clean electricity rise over the coming decades, since that will mean less polluting cars, healthier homes and buildings, and cleaner air and water. With concerted action from policymakers, data centers might help make that picture a reality. The fact is: data centers are here. The opportunity is: turning them into a catalyst for clean energy transformation.

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