My Edmonds News
Snohomish County PUD will run planned nighttime outages in Edmonds October 20 to 28 as crews replace aging wood transmission poles with steel along 188th Street Southwest and 88th Avenue West. The work covers six nights, each from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., with intermittent road closures along both streets.
GeekWire
An $800 clue in a Y Combinator category on Tuesday's 'Jeopardy!' pointed to Everett-based Helion: the company says it will build the first power plant using fusion, and three-day champion Greg Monson supplied the right question. CEO David Kirtley shared the moment on LinkedIn, writing that clean, safe, reliable power is getting a little more mainstream.
The Daily Herald
Snohomish County PUD proposed a 2027 electric budget of $769 million in operating spending plus $239 million in capital spending for system reliability upgrades, with no rate increase. Officials credited better-than-expected 2025 year-end finances and deferral of lower-priority projects; the last no-increase budget proposal was in 2021, and the most recent change was a 2.5 percent increase that took effect April 1, 2026.
Everett Post
Zap Energy, the Everett-based fusion company, secured U.S. Department of Energy approval for two capacitor development milestones; the devices store and release electricity in sub-second bursts to drive fusion fuel into the extreme conditions needed for power generation. Its 35-kilovolt actively cooled capacitor is rated for 6 billion pulses at 10 hertz, against roughly 100,000 pulses for typical commercial units, and a 2.8-pound prototype held capacitance within 0.25 percent across hundreds of cycles at 8 kilovolts and over 7,000 amps. Design, manufacturing, and testing were done at the company's Everett headquarters.
My Edmonds News
More than 400 people protested at 19 locations across Washington Sunday to demand a statewide moratorium on data centers. In Walla Walla, where Amazon plans a $4.8 billion data center, about 40 people marched to the county community development director's office; Amazon's filings give conflicting cooling-water figures of 14 million and 18 million gallons a year, and two local moratorium petitions have gathered nearly 1,900 signatures. Seattle, Spokane, and Skamania, Benton, and Yakima counties have passed data center moratoriums.
The Daily Herald
Rep. Suzan DelBene writes that the WISeR program, which pays private companies to use AI to review Medicare claims, has delayed care for Washington seniors since launching in January in Washington and five other test states, recounting one senior's long wait for pain-treatment approval. The op-ed warns that CMS plans to expand the program to cancer treatments and other care.
GeekWire
Pascal Matta, a Seattle software engineer turned general contractor, built kolmo.io/permits, a free AI guide to building-permit rules covering 457 verified rules across 80 jurisdictions in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. The tool uses Google's Gemini model with retrieval-augmented generation so answers cite exact city rules and source pages, and generates lot-level breakdowns with a 3D view of a property's buildable envelope; Matta says he has no plans to put it behind a paywall.
My Edmonds News
Economic Alliance Snohomish County and 425 Business will host People-centered AI: Boosting Productivity Without Replacing Jobs, the next session in EASC's Coffee Chats series, October 13 from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. on Zoom with a Facebook simulcast. The free session covers real-world business applications of AI, workforce impacts, upskilling, and change management; registration is required and attendees receive session resources by email.
Lynnwood Times
Everett and Snohomish County PUD leaders cut the ribbon September 19 on El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos, a 400-kilowatt community solar array and public-art installation on 1.75 acres next to Walter E. Hall Park on Casino Road in south Everett. The roughly $2.5 million project, over 80 percent covered by grants and tax credits including $861,814 from the state Clean Energy Fund, generates enough electricity for about 30 homes; revenue from its power goes to the PUD's Community Energy Fund, which has provided over $40,000 in bill assistance to about 200 families.
Boro Software
Boro Software, an Everett software company, took Kumi (組) from idea to a demoable MVP and toolkit in six weeks, crediting AI coding agents for the pace. The product is a ground-up rewrite of TAK (Team Action Kit) server concepts, built to serve markets beyond TAK's traditional military and law-enforcement users.
Lynnwood Times
Helion, the Everett-based fusion company, has grown from 80 to 800 employees over four years and opened a downtown Seattle office September 8 for its business team. Its Orion facility under construction in Malaga, Chelan County is designed to deliver at least 50 megawatts of electricity beginning in 2028 under a 2023 power purchase agreement with Microsoft; the company has raised over $1.5 billion and was valued at $15.5 billion after a $465 million round this year.
Snohomish County Tribune
The Snohomish School District offers 18 career and technical education pathways, and its worksite learning program gives students CTE credit for supervised paid work. This opinion piece argues local employers should carry that learn-by-doing model into jobs exposed to AI.
The Daily Herald
Snohomish County PUD will hold a ribbon-cutting September 19 for its $2.5 million community solar facility at Walter E. Hall Park on Casino Road in south Everett, largely paid for by state grants. The array produces about 400,000 kilowatt hours a year and has operated since December 2024; power-sale revenue, about $40,000 so far, goes to the PUD's Community Energy Fund for bill assistance.
Snohomish County Tribune
All but one person who testified at the county's hearing on its data center moratorium opposed allowing data centers, and more residents submitted written comments in opposition. The council set the six-month moratorium on data centers in unincorporated areas in late June; one Arlington-area resident urged the council not to trade the county's farms, forests and homes for data centers.
The Daily Herald
About 13 people spoke at the Snohomish County Council's public hearing on its six-month moratorium on new data center development in unincorporated areas. Most supported the moratorium and some called for a permanent ban; Council member Nate Nehring said permanent regulation will take several months and anticipated extending the pause to a full year.
Lynnwood Times
The Snohomish County Council scheduled a public hearing for 10:30 a.m. August 19 in Everett on Emergency Ordinance 26-026, the six-month moratorium it adopted unanimously on June 24. The ordinance pauses applications for data centers of 2 megawatts or greater in all zones of unincorporated Snohomish County and expires December 25 unless renewed.
Everett Post
Greater Everett Chamber of Commerce CEO Wendy Poischbeg reports that aerospace and defense companies at the Farnborough Air Show stressed human workers stay essential as AI spreads through aviation. The piece cites a Gallup poll finding 47 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 believe AI does more harm than good, up from 36 percent in 2025, and points to training programs at Paine Field, AM-TEC, and WSU Everett.
Boro Software
Everett-based Boro Software shipped Shopboard, a job tracker for small machine shops: operators log Start and Done on a floor tablet, and the office gets a live board, a digital traveler per job, and reports on late jobs and actual costs. The company credits agentic development for the delivery speed and is recruiting a small group of founding shops to run it on live work at discounted pricing.
Boro Software
Boro Software's post-mortem on porting freediag, roughly 30,000 lines of C, to Rust in a week with Claude Code agents on a 20x Max plan: the Rust build was validated against the C executable's replay harnesses rather than real cars, and the ported source is public under the original license.
Boro Software
Everett's Boro Software tunes its Claude Code agent workflow on freediag, an open-source OBD-II diagnostics tool in aging C: tickets get labeled by difficulty and model, weaker models' work is adversarially reviewed by stronger ones, and concurrent agents are capped at 4 to 6 to control cost.
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