Sirti Launch Pad Key Spokane Asset

Spokane needs an economic rocket or two to raise local wages and boost our region’s economy. Another Microsoft, if you please.

OK, how about one of the oldest companies in town? Avista Corp., founded in 1889 to supply pioneers with electricity from a rudimentary water wheel, suddenly has roared into the Wall Street stratosphere, where trendy high-tech companies float on wings of speculation. At the beginning of this month, Avista’s stock hovered in the vicinity of $15 a share, where it had languished for months.

Then it caught the eye of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, among others, and its price rocketed as high as $68 a share before settling yesterday around $47.

A utility? In orbit alongside the innovators of biotechnology and internet commerce? Yup. And therein lies a story.

It’s a story about private-sector risk taking, innovation, diversification. Avista’s executives and product developers, present and past, built that rocket. Along the way they experienced some costly failures as well as the successes Wall Street has now begun to validate. The successes that account for the stock’s rise include Avista’s ventures into fuel cells, electronic billing services and telecommunications.

This also is a story that validates Spokane’s longstanding effort to build a launching pad served by the brainpower of higher education research.

The most glamorous of Avista’s three hot ventures is the development of a highly promising fuel cell technology. Fuel cells convert natural gas into electricity, using a “proton-exchange” process whose only byproduct is water. Fuel cells are so simple and small, they could eliminate the need for power lines and generating plants. No wonder Wall Street investors want in on the ground floor. The market potential is vast.

Avista’s modular fuel cell technology, simpler than others on the market, took shape at the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute, commonly known as SIRTI. It is a considerable irony, therefore, that SIRTI’s existence is in jeopardy. A federal grant that funded its early operations has ended. Funding from the Legislature - roughly $400,000 - is needed to keep the research institute alive, along with its latest projects. Some of those projects might not pan out but some might take off like a rocket someday. All of them make education a partner with our local economy.

No one now knows what lies ahead for Avista. But let us at least acknowledge the value of research and innovation, keep our local research institute funded, and keep our aspirations high.