Distributed Energy Resources like solar panels, battery storage, smart meters, and grid-responsive technologies
empower customers to generate, store, and manage their own power.

City Light wants to help you produce and store power at your home or business. Distributed energy resources (DERs) include rooftop solar panels, battery units that can store energy for later use, and electric vehicles that can store electricity and send it back to the grid. DERs also include smart thermostats and heat pumps that can automatically adjust their energy use to run during non-peak hours when electricity rates are lower.

We have heard from our communities that they want access to solar energy, backup power during outages, better appliances, and electric vehicles. We want to respond to this feedback while keeping your costs low and making the grid more resilient and efficient.

To do this, we created a Solar and Battery Storage Strategy.

What are the Benefits of DERs?

Lower Bills and Backup Power

DERs like solar panels and batteries give you access to local, renewable energy. They help the environment and can save you money. You can also store grid power in your batteries to use when the power goes out.

Community Solar and Resilience Hubs

We are engaging the community to understand where are the best places to put solar panels and batteries. Community solar lets more people benefit from solar energy, especially renters and customers with lower incomes. Community resilience hubs provide heating, cooling, food storage, and phone charging for the community during power outages.

An Improved Power Grid for Everyone

Customer solar and batteries may help us save money on grid updates. This improves reliability and keeps electricity rates lower for all our customers.

How We Can Help

Making It Easier to Connect to Our Grid

We continue to look for ways to improve customer experience across our customer energy programs. This includes the solar and battery interconnection processes. We published the DER Interconnection Handbook in January 2026. This guide gives solar and battery installers step-by-step instructions for getting utility approval to safely interconnect DERs to the grid. It shows the requirements and provides estimates on how long the process normally takes from start to finish.

Offering Existing and New Solar and Battery Storage Programs

We plan to expand offerings to accelerate residential and commercial projects. This way, we can ensure all customers share the benefits of solar and storage. For example, we are designing a new community solar program and a solar credit allocation program so financial benefits of solar can be shared with multiple customers.

We are considering historic and existing harms to priority populations that have historically been left out of the clean energy transition. This is critical as we work toward achieving energy justice. We are improving outreach and education and increasing access to programs by:

• Reducing barriers to participate, such as auto-enrollment in programs.
• Offering increased financial incentives to reduce upfront costs of buying new technologies.
• Offering programs to those that have not had access.
• Investing utility resources in a new Community Solar program.

Creating Community Solar Projects and Resilience Hubs

We are designing a new community solar program. This will let renters and people who cannot install solar panels get financial benefits on their bills from a shared community solar project.

We are also working with local cities in our service area, Community Liaisons from the City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, and the City’s Office of Sustainability and Environment. Together, we will identify potential sites and build community resilience hubs. These hubs will be gathering spaces that may have backup power from solar and batteries.