Community Renewable Options
How does Community and Shared Solar work?
Contrary to what many believe, community solar arrays are not physically powering individual homes and businesses. Rather, the energy is going to the Avista electric grid on behalf of program participants and appear as a monthly energy (kWh) credit on the customer’s bill.
Interested in participating in future community solar programs? Send us an email.
What is Buck-A-Block? It's clean, renewable energy. It's low cost. And it's up to you! Whether you rent or own, as an Avista electric customer you have the option to make a difference. Avista's Buck-A-Block program offers you a simple way to support renewable energy with no contracts and the option to cancel at any time.
How does it work?
First, you commit to adding one or more $1 blocks of renewable energy offsets to your monthly bill, on top of your normal energy charges.
Avista will use these funds to purchase Renewable Energy Certifications (think wind and solar) from regional sources on your behalf. Each $1 block you purchase represents 300 kWh of clean, renewable energy.
If you consider that the average customer uses between 600-1,000 kWh of electricity each month, then it only takes 2-4 $1 blocks to offset the average home's usage! Not too shabby for just a few bucks extra each month.
Ready to enroll?
There's no better time than now to start offsetting your energy usage with clean, renewable energy.
Avista’s Community Solar project in the Spokane Valley was the largest of it’s kind when first energized in 2015.
For customers who don’t have the space or want the burden of owning and maintaining a system, but would still like to support renewable energy, Community Solar was developed using both state and federal incentives making the program financially viable for the 650 residential and commercial customer participants.
The 423 kW solar array produces enough electricity to power 68 homes annually, providing the environmental equivalents of:
- 947,479 miles not driven
- 1,082 road trips from Spokane, WA to San Francisco, CA
- 6,408 tree seedlings grown for 10 years or 49,413,414 smartphone charges
Solar Select® is a renewable energy program that allows Avista’s commercial and industrial electric customers, in Washington, the unique opportunity to acquire solar electricity and the associated Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) with no additional costs to your business.
Located in central Washington in the heart of Adam’s county where the farming community is alive and vibrant, we are harvesting a new kind of commodity – solar energy.
The project was built and developed as a part of growing demand from large business customers and both state and federal incentives were used to bring down the cost for the 60 customer participants.
The array includes more than 80,000 panels across 200 acres, estimating to generate 48,500,000 kWh’s of electricity annually – that’s enough to power up to 4,000 homes and generate the environmental equivalents of:
Reservation request form
The Solar Select® program is currently fully subscribed. If you are interested in requesting your business be added to the waitlist, please complete a reservation request form.
Reservation forms must be electronically submitted to solarselect@avistacorp.com.
Customer participants include a mix of businesses across Washington state, including:
- City of Spokane
- Huckleberry’s
- Inland Imaging
- Hotstart
- Gonzaga University
Look for the Solar Select window cling to identify other local business participants.