Washington wind project will track pronghorn before construction to see whether turbines alter their seasonal movements
The Horse Heaven Hills are a series of windswept ridges located east of Kennewick, Washington. These open spaces are a place where pronghorn antelope migrate every year on trails that had already been established in the landscape prior to the creation of any maps by humans.
It is before even one turbine has been installed at the Horse Heaven Wind project that wildlife researchers are tagging pronghorns with GPS tracking collars.
This information could be key to answering one question that the Horse Heaven Wind project is currently unable to answer about itself: does building an industrial wind power facility affect the migration patterns of North America’s fastest mammal?
Physical barriers like fences, roads, and large structures can stop or redirect them in ways that accumulate into larger ecological consequences over time.
A landscape on the edge of transformation
The Horse Heaven Hills are not merely an area of natural beauty. Located on the Columbia River plateau southeast of Kennewick, these grassy, semi-arid lands create a seasonally passable corridor for pronghorn, which have been navigating through here for generations. Clear visibility, sparse vegetation, and low numbers of obstructions make this land exactly what pronghorn need for safe travel between grazing lands.
However, the Horse Heaven Wind project will come along and turn the area into a large-scale utility project, which will install hundreds of turbines in terrain that pronghorn navigate unimpeded. The signing of the project’s site certification agreement by the governor in October 2024 gives the regulatory stamp of approval for the project, thus setting the stage for a long list of preconstruction requirements which will have to be fulfilled.
However, this is nothing unusual for the American West, where the development of renewable energy projects and wildlife habitats are colliding more often. The uniqueness of Horse Heaven is the project’s attempt to document the collision before anything happens.
Collars before concrete: The logic of pre-construction monitoring
The rationale for GPS collar-fitting of pronghorns is fairly clear-cut – you cannot gauge changes if you do not know what was there originally. The information regarding the movements, frequency, and seasonal ranges of the pronghorns would be the only baseline data available when the post-construction phase of monitoring begins.
The data collection process consists of gathering information about the movement patterns of pronghorns – what ridges they cross, what valleys they avoid, and how these patterns differ during different seasons. This is done without the pronghorns. According to the SCA, all the pre-construction wildlife plans must get EFSEC approval before the construction even starts. The specific details of this requirement are outlined in Article IV of the document, while Appendix 2 specifies the mitigation measures for the current pre-construction phase.
The pronghorn as a living instrument
Pronghorn are built for open land. They’re the fastest land animal in North America, capable of sustaining speeds that most predators can’t match — but that speed depends on unobstructed terrain and clear sightlines. Physical barriers like fences, roads, and large structures can stop or redirect them in ways that accumulate into larger ecological consequences over time.
What the GPS collars will eventually tell is whether or not any of the various possible outcomes have been generated by the turbines. The most conservative scenario would involve a slight deviation: pronghorns shift their paths to bypass areas where construction is taking place, but keep on moving through the same corridor overall. An even more drastic one is a closure of the corridor: animals no longer move across certain parts of their natural habitat.
Only in the course of post-construction research will it be determined what the outcome of the situation is. Every piece of data collected by the GPS collar is a “before” in wait for an “after.”
The advisory group shaping the plan
However, the GPS collar system cannot be considered separately from other actions, as the collar program is part of the mitigation structure which was specially developed for this project according to the SCA. In particular, the Pre-Operational Technical Advisory Group (PTAG) should be created for this project in accordance with the requirements of the SCA.
The first PTAG meeting was held in February 2025. The task of the group is to develop wildlife and habitat mitigation and management plans for this project which should be reviewed and approved by the EFSEC prior to construction. Thus, PTAG acts as an advisory stage between project developers and the regulatory body, ensuring that the wildlife mitigation plan is discussed by experts, and not submitted as a formal document.
What the data could mean beyond Horse Heaven
Provided the Horse Heaven collaring study yields comparable, clean pre- and post-results, it could provide the wind industry with one thing it currently does not have – a method of measuring the effects of turbines on large migratory mammals.
Pronghorn already face fragmentation pressure across their range. Roads, fences, and development have interrupted historic corridors in multiple states. Data showing exactly how — or whether — wind infrastructure alters movement behavior would be valuable to regulators, developers, and conservation planners working on future projects in similar terrain. The results could eventually reshape how other states structure wildlife requirements for wind energy permitting. That’s a long timeline, years of data collection and analysis, but the process has already started.
As far as right now, out in the Horse Heaven Hills, there’s a pronghorn running through the sagebrush wearing a collar that’s charting its coordinates. The pronghorn isn’t sure what question it’s answering, but one day when the turbines start rising up around it, the collar will know where it went.
Kelly is an experienced writer with 15 years of experience exploring the big stories that shape our world, from tech breakthroughs and space exploration to climate, energy, and the fascinating quirks of science. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into sharp, memorable insights that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading.
