Avista-backed Novara Energy Alliance to promote collaboration in Spokane’s energy sector

Spokane’s energy sector is looking toward the future.

The newly announced Novara Energy Alliance is a collaboration between Avista Corp., Itron Inc., and McKinstry Co. to study solutions for problems facing the Spokane energy industry.

Interim CEO Kim Pearman-Gillman said the companies tasked with providing energy to the Inland Northwest are too often siloed from each other and need to provide a unified response to the energy issues they face.

“Novara sees itself as connective tissue. How do we bring all the different people together to solve these problems,” she said at the alliance’s launch Wednesday.

Avista provides natural gas and electricity to homes across Spokane and the surrounding region. Itron is a Liberty Lake-based energy technology company that produces electricity, gas, water and thermal energy measurement devices and other software. McKinstry is a national construction and energy services company that focuses on developing environmentally sustainable products. Other energy-related companies and governments will be added to the alliance in the future.

The most pressing issues initially outlined by the alliance are energy’s increasing cost to consumers, greater demand, aging infrastructure and transition to clean energy. These issues and others will be addressed by “innovation teams” that are formed from leaders and technical experts by the different companies that make up the alliance.

The inaugural Novara Energy Summit will be held in October where innovation team members will present “something like a series of very short TED Talks” on these problems, Pearman-Gillman said. A series of problem statements will be developed at the summit that the innovation teams will tackle in the coming years.

“We absolutely believe through innovation in this space that there will be new products, new solutions, new companies, and health developments. It is an economic development play at its very heart, and at the end of the day, it’s about making sure that our communities thrive,” said Novara board chair and Avista Vice President Latisha Hill.

Novara is also a merger of two Spokane based innovation hubs: Urbanova and the Inland Northwest Center for Energy and Decarbonization, which used the acronym INTENT. Focused on deploying and studying technologies like smart streetlights and air-quality sensors, Urbanova was founded by Avista, the city of Spokane and Washington State University in 2017. The Inland Northwest Center for Energy and Decarbonization was created in 2023 to find solutions related to the clean energy transition. Both nonprofits have now been folded into the Novara Energy Alliance.