This building is the headquarters of Washington State's Associations of PUDs.

The builiding is at 212 Union Avenue. It is featured on the Fall 2007 issue of the PUD magazine Connections. The building has 159 solar panels on the roof are expected to produce about 40% of the building's energy needs and will be able to feed electricity back to the grid through grid-tie technology when the sun shines and the panels create more electricity than the building uses at any given moment.

The solar panels were donated by REC Silicon, a company in Moses Lake that is building solar panels.

The State of Washington has passed incentives for installing photovoltaics that are especially attractive if the installation is constructed with solar panels constructed in Washington State. It's inspired public policy. It commits to real production jobs here in Washington State, building solar panels, not the kind of production jobs that the Federal Dept of Labor wants to recognize and count, like the assembly of a big mac as a production job. Building durable goods, that's production. Building clean energy durable goods, that' ethical production.

Here is information regarding the grid tie incentives for photovoltaics installation in Washington State. I will be first to admit that installation of huge numbers of solar panels in Washington State will not stop the melting of the ice caps on Mars, but I think they may help with our problems here on Earth. Sad as it may be to see the ice caps of Mars go the way of the dodo, I think we better start with saving Earth's ice caps.