As the energy landscape grows more complex, utilities see new technologies as critical to making electricity more clean, affordable and reliable. Yet how can they nurture innovation in a historically conservative industry? On the Grid Forward podcast GridPulse, Avista CEO Heather Rosentrater shared the ways her team is embedding innovation across the organization, not just within a single team, to navigating rising operational risks. Avista is empowering employees to rethink how work gets done, optimize business operations, and communicate with communities.
If you’re looking for inspiration for how to make innovation integral to your organization, learn from Heather’s experience at Avista. Below is an excerpt of her remarks in a transcript generated with AI and lightly edited for conciseness. Or listen to the entire episode on the web or your favorite podcast app.
Bryce Yonker, executive director and CEO, Grid Forward: Avista is not a big utility… congratulations that you all are at the front edge of innovation. Why is innovation so important there at your utility?
Heather Rosentrater: We acknowledge we’re on the smaller side, especially for investor-owned utilities. We recognize that we have to punch above our weight. We have to be more innovative because we have some similar fixed costs that are spread across our customers compared to the larger utilities that have more customers to spread them across. So we have to be even more innovative and focused on cost management and taking advantage of new advancing technology.
Those are the kinds of things that we focus on intentionally, so how do we keep that innovation alive? Because the type of business we’re in is just inherently challenging to innovate because the grid isn’t a lab. It can’t be a lab. It needs to be very reliable. And we know to innovate, you have to fail fast to learn fast. And we can’t be failing on our grid. And so just by the nature of the type of work we do, it focuses more on quality and consistency and standardization, and is harder to learn fast, to do things differently, to test things.
That’s why we’ve been so focused on creating a simulation lab where we have our entire system, so we can test things before we put them on the grid. We focused on doing design thinking, training, and having this “how might we” kind of attitude. So instead of saying “well, we’ve tried that, it didn’t work” or “we’ve always done it this way,” it’s “well, we’ve got new tensions, we’ve got new technology to be able to solve those challenges in new ways.”
How might we take advantage of these things or do things differently? It’s been very intentional activity from creating an innovation station team that helps groups and individuals who have new ideas be able to figure out how to explore those. And look at “is there new IP that we should create based on this idea? Is there a new equipment? Should we partner with someone to advance this? Is there just a new process that we want to operationalize to support everyday innovation?” We’ve brought in that design thinking to help us support those kind of ideas.
We’ve thrown pitch jams where we have our employees teeing up ideas, and the audience is voting on the best ideas. One of those ideas was substation as art… Although we as utility individuals love our substations and think they’re beautiful, the average community member may not. Yet they’re in our communities. And so in one of our new substations in our downtown area, we got local artists to help create art for those substations. It’s really additive to the neighborhood instead of taking away from the beauty of the neighborhood. Examples like that that are pretty unique that I think come up through the intentional environment and systems and expectations that we put in place.
Operationalizing of the innovation is probably the hardest step along the way to getting the value out of it. – Heather Rosentrator
Bryce Yonker: I would say that most utilities, if they have an innovation focus, they box it: “this is our innovation team and we only do innovation here.” But it seems much more dispersed there. How do you all bring it across into the organization?
Heather Rosentrater: I did start here at one of those companies that was a fuel cell subsidiary that ultimately Plug Power purchased several years ago. That was my expectation; that’s the kind of company we are. When we experienced the energy crisis, it did pull us back. I think a lot of utilities said “back to basics”… And I joke that it was like “well, don’t even think about innovation. Like we are just doing pipes and wires and focused on that.”
When we got financially healthy again, I was able to say, “okay, are there baby steps we can take to kind of bring that back?” Because it is truly important—from a “how we operate and as efficiently as possible and from an even culture and employee empowerment perspective—to be intentional about supporting that kind of culture… I recognize it can’t be just selected people that get to do the innovation, and then they throw it over the wall to the engineers that have a pile of designs that they have to do. Then that innovation project goes to the bottom of that pile, if it’s done that way.
I recognized, okay, we need to have this be embedded intentionally into how we’re doing our work so that when after we’ve tested it and tried it out and piloted it or demonstrated it, that we can actually operationalize it. I do think that operationalizing of the innovation is probably the hardest step along the way to getting the value out of it for a lot of different reasons. Understanding that that is going to be one of the more challenging steps is driving us to “how do we bring more people into that innovation side,” both because the ones that are doing the designs every day probably have the best understanding of where the tensions are, where the challenges are, and how to solve them. And you support what you create. And so having them on the front end of doing things differently and evaluating it and designing it is going to help you get through that operationalizing step most effectively
Listen to the entire episode, and all past episodes, on our GridPulse web page or your podcast app.
