Spokane-based Novara Energy Alliance is preparing to host its inaugural Novara Energy Summit 2026, where innovators, researchers, and leaders will convene to identify the most pressing energy challenges facing the Inland Northwest. 

The one-day summit is scheduled for Oct. 7, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Mirabeau Park Hotel & Convention Center, 1100 N. Sullivan Road, in Spokane Valley. Up to 150 attendees from across the Inland Northwest are expected to attend, says Novara Energy Alliance CEO Nathan South. 

The goal of the summit is to position the newly formed organization — launched earlier this year in May — as the bridge connecting the people and organizations committed to advancing the future of energy in the region through innovation and collaboration.

“I think generally in this type of situation, the solution likely already exists,” South says. “You just have suppliers that are struggling for that first opportunity, and if we can create a welcoming environment for that, that would be a success.”

Summit attendees will hear keynote presentations from Heather Rosentrater, president and CEO of Spokane-based Avista Corp.; Tom Deitrich, president and CEO of Liberty Lake-based Itron Inc.; and Dean Allen, chairman and CEO of Seattle-based McKinstry Co., according to a press release.

Additionally, about a dozen rapid-fire presentations are scheduled focusing on three critical themes: energy supply, resiliency, and affordability. Through facilitated discussions and breakout sessions, attendees will work together to address the most important issues and identify opportunities where collective action can drive measurable impact.

The goal is to identify the top three problems in each category, leaving the summit with nine potential problems for the alliance to address, South says. From there, Novara will ask utility providers to identify up to three problems that the companies collectively share; would materially improve their businesses, if solved; and have a viable business case — such as reducing costs and increasing revenues.

Novara will form external teams that take the identified challenges outside of the corporate walls, creating a cooperative environment to help better define problems, find entities with solutions, and start proof-of-concept trials to test solutions, he explains. 

Novara Energy Alliance was created to focus on challenges at the intersection of energy and water systems. South joined as the nonprofit's CEO in July, taking over for interim CEO Kim Pearman-Gillman. South has led a career in technology and infrastructure, where much of his work focused on getting companies to collaborate on infrastructure problems. 

As head of rural connectivity at Facebook, South led a “moonshot” effort to connect rural parts of the developing world to internet infrastructure, he says. In that role, his team worked with large telecommunications companies that recognized these infrastructure problems existed but couldn’t solve them individually. South convened several companies to cooperate in spaces in which they traditionally had not. 

“There’s a lot of similarities here in the utility space in that we were trying to get big telecommunications incumbents to think differently about how they approach these problems,” South says. “I’m hoping to do something similar here.”