“In 2014, Bhatraju launched Arcadia Power. The process for customers is pretty straightforward: connect your utility bill with Arcadia Power, and automatically 50 percent of your energy will come from renewable sources, notably wind. Members then have the option to opt into other programs: 100 percent wind power, community solar, and price alerts.
Last year was the tipping point for the startup: it finally reached a customer ‘load’ that gave Arcadia Power negotiating power to find the lowest priced clean power, which would often run 10 to 25 percent less than the utility rate, Bhatraju says. “This was a game changer for us because we can now save our members significant money by using renewable energy. Large companies use this same aggregate buying power to tap into clean energy at low costs.”
“No matter where you live in the United States, Arcadia makes it possible to source at least 50 percent of your energy from a wind plant with just a few clicks. Since its founding in 2014, the company has connected 175,000 customers to renewables and averted over 320,000 tons of CO2 emissions—the equivalent of taking 68,685 cars off the road for a year.
Arcadia predicts that it will soon be even easier to quickly switch over to renewable energy, thanks to a burgeoning community solar market. These large-scale solar farms are privately managed by community members and put energy back into the local grid.”
“If you live in Alaska, it’s now possible to buy solar power from California or Washington D.C. In what it bills as a nationwide community solar program, a startup called Arcadia Power is selling remote “solar subscriptions” to anyone who can’t easily install solar panels directly–and then giving customers a credit on their utility bill.
‘We’re connecting any customer that pays a power bill to a project that we build and manage,’ says Kiran Bhatraju, founder and CEO of Arcadia Power. ‘It’s modular–it can be as little as one panel, or they can buy enough panels to offset their entire power bill.’”
“Arcadia Power is among the first digital platform to provide wind energy directly to more than 80,000 residential electricity customers across the nation including several thousand members in Arkansas and Oklahoma.”