And CEO of Avista, and I'd like you to welcome you to our Avista's 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. And as we begin this meeting this morning, I will caution you that we will be making forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties which are subject to change. I would direct you to Avista's Form 10 ks which was filed with the SEC on February 21 and is also available on our website for reference to the various factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from the contemplated or to the extent these factors are not discussed in this meeting. But before I begin the business portion of the meeting, I would like to introduce our Board. You'll notice the names of the Board, the names of our Board members and their backgrounds appeared in your proxy.
So I'm just going to introduce our board members and ask them to stand. Christy Blake, Don Burke, Becky Klein, Scott Ma, Mark Roscoe, Heidi Stanley, John Taylor, Dennis Vermillion and Janet Widman. This is a great opportunity for all of us to thank our directors for amount of time they dedicate to the company. They do such a fantastic job for us and I say this all the time, I am blessed by one of the very best boards a CEO could work with. So I want to thank them personally for their dedication and their great work.
So thank you very much. 2 retired directors who are here with us today. Former Chairman, 2 retired directors who are here with us today. Former Chairman, President and CEO, Paul Redmond and former Chairman, Larry Stanley, are with us today. And if you didn't know this, earlier in the year, both Paul and Larry were honored by our Spokane community as people who have outstanding not just what they did in their businesses, but what they did in their communities.
It was a well deserved honor for both Paul and Larry, and I just want to congratulate them on that recognition. You guys have always been my mentors, and I appreciate all that you do. Before I introduce the executive officers, I'd like to acknowledge and thank all of our employees, both active and retired for their dedication and support. They step up to all of our challenges and they not only provide excellent service, but they show us sincere commitment to the company, our customers and the communities that we serve. And our employees are really what makes this company great.
And I am so honored to work with all 1800 of them every single day. So now I'd like to introduce our executive officers. Again, I'm blessed to have one of the best executive officer teams in the industry and I love coming to work, working with them and being with them every single day. Kevin Christie, Brian Cox, Marion Durkin, Karen Feltes, Jim Kensock, Ryan Krasselt, David Meyer, Heather Rosentrader, Ed Schlecht, Jason Thaxton, Mark Thies, Dennis Vermillion and joining us from AEL and P. It's always fun to have the President of AEL and P join us this morning, Connie Hulberg.
Connie, thanks for joining us all the way from Juneau. Our Executive Officer team, can you So at this time, we'll convene the business portion of the meeting. The first matter to be considered at this meeting is the election of directors. Ten directors are standing for election for a 1 year term. The Board recommends a vote for each director.
There are no other nominations at this time. The second matter to be considered at this meeting is the proposal by the Board that the shareholders ratify the Board's appointment of the firm of Deloitte and Touche as the independent registered public accounting firm for 2019. The Board also recommends a vote for this proposal. And the 3rd matter to be considered is an advisory vote, nonbinding on the company's executive compensation. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal as well.
If there are any shareholders who did not yet vote, you may execute a ballot at our Investor Relations table when you leave the meeting today, and I want to assure you that your vote will be counted. Those who are voting this morning, again, your votes will be counted. And as you are aware, a very large majority of our shareholders have already voted. And the preliminary voting results as of this morning show that the proposals have all passed. So that really concludes the business portion of our meeting today.
And I'd just like to talk a little bit about the business. And this is such an exciting time for the utility industry. I'm in my 38th year, and I can tell you I've never seen anything quite like it. With all the new and exciting technologies that are happening in our industry, the digitization and the automation of what's happening with the utility grid and so many opportunities that are open up because of that digitization and automation. And then with the decline of really the prices of green energy generation, is creating for us, I would say, not an evolution in our industry, but I will tell you that it truly is we are at the kind of a cusp, I think of an energy revolution in the utility industry.
And I can't think of a company that is more well prepared to meet that revolutionary challenge than Avista. We've been in this business for 130 years and that doesn't make us prepared. What makes us prepared is our history of innovation. We've been on the leading edge of so many innovative things in this industry for 130 years as well as we have been one of the leaders in green energy for our entire 130 year effort. So as this energy revolution happens, we're just not going to participate in it.
We're going to lead it. We're going to lead this revolution. And I can tell you that one of the things you saw that we just did recently was that we said we were going to have 100% clean energy by 2,045. And the other thing I think that was a goal for us to reach. And another thing that is just I think equally substantial is the fact that we're going to have carbon neutral generation by 2027.
And I'm absolutely convinced that that's something that's not just we're able to do, it's very attainable. And again, it's because it's not something that we've been just working on in the last couple of years like a lot of utilities. We've been working on this stuff for decades. It's in our DNA. It's who we are.
It's what we have done as a company, both past and this generation, and I know future generations will do all of that. What else is going on with technology is really exciting is with our customers. And of course, the customers are at the center of all that we do. But and technology is enabling us to serve them much better. But we also need to remember that we need to use this great technology, but we have to couple it with just good old fashioned customer care.
And you have to combine the technology and the customer care and we know we can do that to create an outstanding customer experience every time our employees have the opportunity to touch one of our customers, and we're doing just that. As a utility that serves in 5 states, we know our communities are so important to us. And we just celebrated our 130th anniversary. And one of the things we want to do to say thank you was to offer another $700,000,000 $7,000,000 not 700,000,000 dollars On this board, it was just $7,000,000 not $700,000,000 $7,000,000 of extra philanthropy on top of the over $2,500,000,000 that we already do. And we really wanted to focus it on the communities really in 3 areas.
We wanted to think and really help address some of the issues around homelessness that happen in both large and small communities. We have so many in our five states. We have a lot of smaller communities. We wanted to be able to help energize their economy and their communities. So a lot of the money will be focused on some of the smaller communities that we serve.
And then finally, we wanted to do what we always like to do is just help the kids in our communities. So that's where the $7,000,000 is going. And finally, what's going to make all this happen, the tip of the spear, the thing that makes me come to work every day is to work with the 100 outstanding people that really are what this company is all about. They come our employees come to work energized, dedicated, focused and ready to go every single day. I am so proud to work for a company that really that's what this company is all about is our people.
And then finally, I can assure you as the Chairman and CEO, our focus always remains on providing you the very best shareholder return we possibly can. And with that, to give you more detail about what all these strategies are about, the exciting things that are happening in industry. I'm really proud to introduce to you the President of our company, Dennis Vermillion. So Dennis?
Great. Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I'm very excited to be here this morning to, as Scott said, give you a little bit of detail about some of the things, just a few of the things that we're doing in our company. It's very exciting. And as Scott talked about, we're doing some visionary things in our business.
And I can tell you that we've been planning for today for many years. We're ready to go. Whether it's around the clean energy goals that Scott mentioned, the investing in economic development in our community as a platform for growth, partnering with our with people in the community to drive prosperity in the communities that we serve, piloting new technology and of course investing in our utility infrastructure so that we can serve our customers today and into the future. We have a clear path forward and we are delivering on our vision of better energy for life. So how about a little bit of detail on the clean energy?
There's 3 things I'd like to talk to you this morning about briefly. Three things that we've done in the last 3 years to drive to our goals of clean energy that Scott mentioned. The first one is the Adams Nielsen solar project. So if you look at this slide, this is a solar project that came online in October. Was it I think it was October.
Got it. Sorry, Jason. October of last year and it's one of 3 solar projects that have come online in the last 3 years. This one was exciting because it's located just outside of Lynde, Washington. If you know where Lynde, Washington is, it's in Adams County, which is a part of our service area, very rural.
So this is a big deal for them when it comes from an economic development perspective and providing a tax base and jobs for that community. So a big win. This is actually the celebration dedication, the picture on the left. We partnered with Strata Solar and a 28 Megawatt facility and we targeted this the output of this facility to large business customers of ours. So we knew that there was a need from our larger customers, business customers to want to buy into solar so that they could help meet some of their sustainability goals.
And so we were able to do this. We crafted what I would call as a community solar project for commercial customers. We called it Solar Select. And it was fully subscribed in less than one day, 28 megawatts fully subscribed in less than one day. So it gives you an idea of how much demand there was from our customers to want to buy in to meet their sustainability goals.
So it's great project. We're excited to be able to bring that online. The second one I wanted to mention, it's actually not online yet, but it is we just signed a 20 year power purchase agreement for a wind project. Also in Adams County, our partners there are Clearway Energy Group. It's 144 Megawatt capacity wind project with 50 average megawatts of energy.
So on an average basis, that's about enough energy to power 38,000 of our customers' homes. And obviously, a lot of environmental attributes that come with this project. But as Scott mentioned, when he talked about price, it's remarkable that the price of this product, 20 year power purchase agreement, prices less than half of the Palouse Wind project that came online on our system just 7 years ago. So it's a great example of just how much the price of these renewable technologies has come down. So we're excited to bring that one on.
And then the third one was a community solar, our original community solar for that came online. And it was the at the time, it was the largest community solar project in the state of Washington that serves our residential our residential customers could buy and that's been a big success. Also one note on this solar farm here, it is currently the largest one in the state of Washington. So we're making a lot of progress in bringing in cost effective renewables onto our system and there's more to come, obviously, as we march towards our goals. The other thing on this is you may have seen that we recently announced that we're joining the Western Energy Imbalance Market or the Western EIM.
It's a market that's administered by the California Independent System Operator, the CAL ISO. And many or most, I would say, of the large utilities in the West are now part of this market. And it really what it's usually utilities that have a lot of renewables on their system and it more effectively allows them and us to integrate our renewables and capture the most value for them for our customers. So we're excited to bring that to engage in that and we expect to be fully operational with the Western EIM in April of 2022. So a lot of good stuff happening on clean energy.
Of course, we're continuing to invest and creating communities of the future. A lot going on downtown South Landing. So if you're familiar with the University District, it is a cluster that is just east of downtown. And what we have been doing is driving development in what we call the South Landing. So it's across the railroad tracks in the south of the U District.
And we've got a couple of things going on. What I wanted to focus on is the catalyst building. This is a revolutionary structure and building what we're trying to do and what we are creating in downtown Spokane. The South or the Catalyst building is I think we're setting records and standards on collaboration with community partners. It's been a lot of hard work, but it's been very rewarding as well.
And it's a place where academia and industry will come together to innovate and collaborate when it is completed. On the right here is an artist rendering of the building itself, Five stories, nearly 160,000 square feet. It's a beautiful building. It's under construction. It will be completed next year.
And constructed of mass timber, cross laminated timber or CLT. It's half the energy usage of a conventional building. It is a net zero energy and net zero carbon building and it's able to do that with on-site distributed generation at that site and then elsewhere in the area there. So it is it's one of the it will be one of the largest net zero buildings in the world and it is the first one in Eastern Washington. So it comes in at a cost of kind of a minimum standard code standard building.
So very, very remarkable. And also Eastern Washington University, when I talk about academia being with industry, Eastern Washington University has announced they're going to move their entire College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math here. Pretty awesome. So you can see how when they there are initial tenants and largest tenant, anchor tenant, if you will, and that's just going to be the catalyst to really kick that area off exciting. The other building here is what we call the hub building.
It's part of our eco district. We recently were awarded a grant from the Washington Department of Commerce, their Clean Energy III fund and we're using some of that funding to build out our eco district in this area. So think of there's going to be a number of buildings in this cluster at the South Landing that will not only we will be experiment with building controls and optimizing building management for each building, but within the group of building within the cluster. So think of it as a shared energy economy. In this case, it's a shared management building management kind of concept.
And so we're excited about that. We can test in demand management, autonomous demand management, load shifting, a lot of the different things here that will really help the grid. The final thing I just wanted to mention with some of the innovative things we're doing, we've partnered with the Department of Energy specific Northwest National Labs PNNL to test new battery technologies and thermal storage technologies. We're working with them on transactive building controls that we can deploy in our system and in other systems that will help with grid reliability and resiliency and the list goes on and on. So I can stand here and talk about all innovation all day, but I'll move on to our customer because obviously as Scott mentioned, we do we have customers at the center and everything we do really is better service delivery metering infrastructure, AMI, is a key component of that.
We work hard to improve service delivery and give the customers the choice the information they need so they can best manage their energy usage. And AMI, our smart meter project, we started this last fall. We took did a small part of our system in Washington State. We took a break over the winter and now we're at a full steam ahead. It's going very well.
Electric and gas smart meters, Washington customers more information at their fingertips, personalized customized information allows them to make better energy choices, manage their bill. Of course, restoration times when you have an outrige much quicker, It is a foundational element of a clean energy future and it's a major investment step forward for us in modernizing our infrastructure. And then speaking of infrastructure, of course, capital investments in infrastructure, we and we're continuing, Mark, I'm sure will talk about our capital investment here when he gets up and speaks. But we continue to invest and modernize in our utility infrastructure and it's sometimes I call it the blocking and tackling of what we do in the company. And just a couple of examples here on the upper right, we've got a big empty what's going to be Saddle Mountain substation and some substation equipment going in there.
This is a key station that will integrate renewable energy into our system when it comes online. We have a picture of a service in one of our big downtown new buildings. So we're powering economic growth in our communities. And then just maybe a reminder that we are continuing to invest in our natural gas system as well. We're in the middle of a 20 year pipe replacement program.
We have some certain vintage of plastic pipe that tends to get brittle under certain conditions and can leak a little bit. So we're in the middle of a program to replace that. It's going well. So we'll continue to modernize infrastructure. And then finally, I just wanted to ask Scott to just recognize our employees.
We have a lot of good things happening in our company. We're marching forward. We have a clear path, but nothing happens without the skill and dedication of our employees. All 1800 of them, Scott, I'm still on your line here, but it is remarkable. They come to work every day ready to get after it.
And it's just we're so fortunate to have such a great group here as we move forward. So with that, I would like to hand it over to Mark Theiss, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
Got it? Okay. Thanks, Dennis. Like I start on every earnings call, we have a hockey comment. So we're down to the Final 4 in hockey, right?
We're down to this conference finals in the West and East. We got the Sharks playing the Blues. We got the Hurricanes playing the Bruins. I hate all of them. But our company is doing great things financially.
So last year was a great year. We had a lot of things going on as everybody recalls. But we still focused on what we were supposed to do, which is, as Dennis said, blocking and tackling is run the business. We ran the business. We had a good year financially.
The Board raised the dividend 4% last February. And as Dennis said, we invested over $400,000,000 in our system to again maintain and upgrade our electric and natural gas system and technology to serve our customers. And that's what we're doing. To pay for that, we had rate increases. So in 2018, we did have rate increases in Idaho, 2018 2019, and then in Washington, we had an increase in May, but we are behind for 'nineteen.
So if you listen to our last earnings call, we are going to spend our focus now to grow shareholder value to enhance it is file rate cases. So we did file, we're off to a great start, but we filed in Washington and Oregon already this year and we're evaluating filing in Idaho because that's how we get back on track to recover and earn on the capital that we're spending. So we can earn for our shareholders our return. In our Q1, we again, we had a big number with the termination payment. But otherwise, we are slightly off just because of the and higher taxes, but we are on track to make our numbers this year and I expect a strong year.
And just in February, the Board did increase the dividend again 4%. And this morning, the Board approved the dividend for the Q2. So we'll have we continue to have a strong dividend profile for our company. Here's where we spend our capital. And it's there's a lot of it on asset condition.
It's again, maintaining a 130 year old system. We spend a lot of money to make sure that that system runs efficiently. And that's the bulk of it. That's also where a lot we also have then the AMI project. That will be, as Dennis mentioned, the meters for the customers.
Then we spend performance and capacity. The one I always hate is failed plant. Who wants to talk about failed plant? Things break. So when they and it's the smallest part of our capital, it's really tiny.
But we do have things that break. We also have the customer service and reliability, significant dollars we're spending there just so we can make sure, as Scott mentioned, we focus on our customers. Our dividend growth continues to be 4% to 5%. Our earnings growth is going to be a little bit different the next couple of years because we're catching up with rate cases. So we expect higher earnings growth in 2020, 2021 and 2022 and then back to a long term earnings growth of 4% to 5%.
That's consistent with our dividend growth that will get our dividend back to a target of 60% to 70% of earnings by 2022, which is where we expect to be earning our allowed return. We have a solid balance sheet. This is I'm very proud of that. We have a great balance sheet. We have a few smaller maturities in 2019 2020.
We had a big maturity in 2018 and we had to raise over $375,000,000 in debt for that. The next one is in 2022, but our balance sheet is very strong, 48.5 percent equity, 51% debt. We do expect to issue $165,000,000 in debt this year and up to $50,000,000 in equity. The reason that debt that's so well balanced is we expect to refinance the $90,000,000 So really we're about $75,000,000 $50,000,000 for our debt and equity to maintain a strong balance sheet. With that, I will turn it back to Scott.
So Steve, what a great story. We are in great shape and we do have I'm sure open to answering any questions you might have. You noticed we have microphones in each side of the room. If you do have a question, go over to the microphone. If you can just tell me your name, if you represent somebody, that would be great or if you're just representing yourself.
And I'm open for questions. Good morning, Billy. Thanks for joining us this morning.
My question, oh, that came on
real loud, didn't it? Yes.
Yes. My question is in regards to our natural gas fired generating plants, with this carbon elimination that we're going through, what's going to happen to those like the one down in Oregon? The one over in Idaho?
Yes. I can tell you that natural gas will still be a very important gas will still be a very important piece of what we have to do, particularly on what we would call a capacity basis. More and more of our generation can be renewable, but we know the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. And when it doesn't, we need to have some generation ready to go and to make sure that we can turn it on in a moment's notice. And we don't always have enough water in our hydro dams to support that.
So natural gas has to play a role or it will continue to play a role. So it will be part of our portfolio. And part of the strategy will be to get to carbon neutral is to look at opportunities to add more generation on the renewable side to be able to buy renewable energy credits and a number of different strategies in order to make it so that net net at the end of the day by 2027 we're carbon neutral on our emissions. But gas has to play a role in the industry on a going forward basis. Until some new technology happens, particularly around primarily batteries and storage and other things, so that when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, we don't need it.
We could store it. We could turn it on later.
But aren't there some government regulations and laws being passed that would forbid the generation
by that method? Well, there are right now some, I would say there is some pardon the pun, some energy around continuing to look for non carbon solutions. This point, there isn't any laws that prohibit that, but there are some new laws that require us to continue to reduce our carbon emissions. But we have strategies in place through conservation and other avenues in order to be able to do that. But yes, that public policy in the energy world is something that we just have to deal with.
And we get used to it. Our elected officials make that public policy. We try to educate them on what that public policy should be. But at the end of the day, they're our elected officials. And what happens in Olympia or Boise or Washington, D.
C. Are the rules that we play by. And again, because of our history of innovation, we've been working on it for decades, It can make it challenging. But again, because of who we are and what we've done, we're probably in the best position of any utility in the country to be able to kind of maneuver around those policies. Okay.
Thank you. Any other questions for me or the team? Our team is going to be here afterwards a little bit. So if you do want to ask, if you want to ask, if you want to ask at the microphone, grab us and we'd be happy to answer. So not seeing any more questions.
I want to thank you for coming this morning. And again, thank you for investing in our company. It's an exciting time to be in the utility industry and you have a great investment in a great company. So thank you very much.