Intec finds second role in economy

With fewer jobs to train people for, it seeks ways to boost demand for workers

Representatives from a German energy company and a Quincy, Wash., dairy farm met last month at the downtown Spokane offices of the Inland Northwest Technology Education Center, or Intec, http://www.intec-center.org/ to hash out a plan to turn cow manure into electrical power and other marketable products.

By Paul Read Spokane Journal of Business

On the surface, that might seem an odd meeting to be convened by Intec, which was launched in 2000 to help employers here train people for high-tech jobs. But this is 2002, and technology jobs don’t grow on trees anymore, so Intec has decided to do some planting of its own.

Intec CEO Randy Long describes the move as a simple supply-and-demand play. In addition to ensuring a good supply of trained workers here, Intec must—in this economy—also find a way to create demand for such workers.

Whether the cow manure plan will end up fertilizing job growth here won’t be known for some time, but Long says the effort will be worthwhile if for no other reason than to build Spokane’s reputation as “a place where good ideas come from.”

He says Intec has been working quietly for the past year on a number of energy-related initiatives, and the ag-waste-to-energy idea, also called bioenergy, is among them. Economic-development boosters here have identified the energy industry as a promising economic cluster for Spokane to develop.

In the case of the Quincy dairy farmer and the German company, both of which Long declines for now to identify, Intec hopes to create an opportunity out of the huge volume of manure and other agricultural waste found at such farms. The discussions are still early and the details are sketchy, but the parties hope to use a form of anaerobic digestion to create a gas that can be burned to produce power, and in the process create fertilizers and other organic products.

Such a technology also could solve the significant waste-disposal and air- and water-quality issues that dairy farmers face, and perhaps could be designed to use waste from commercial grease traps or even municipal sewage, Intec says.

Long says Intec and its partners in the informal collaboration are studying funding possibilities to build two or more bioenergy plants in the region, at an estimated cost of about $3.5 million each. The plants would be used as demonstration projects that could spur additional uses of such technology. He says that funding likely would include both private and public money.

“Right now, it looks very, very promising,” he says.

Energy distribution

In another strategy aimed at developing a reputation for the Inland Northwest as an energy-technology center, Intec is launching what it calls an Energy Technology Consortium, which would focus on technologies and training aimed at improving energy transmission. The consortium, says Long, would be Intec’s contribution to a new regional effort called the Northwest Energy Technology Collaborative. That organization, launched this summer, includes organizations and businesses ranging from Avista Corp. and the Bonneville Power Administration, to the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute and the Washington Technology Center.

Intec’s energy consortium will seek to develop education and training related to the energy industry, work with universities on energy-related research projects, and promote commercialization of energy technologies.

Long says that while there are a handful of energy-research centers already operating around the country, none focuses on how to make the nation’s aging power-distribution systems more efficient and secure. Spokane could be the first to launch such a center, he claims.

So, Intec wants to push for the creation of an industry training standard for energy-distribution engineers, then develop a curriculum here to train engineers to that standard.

Long says Intec’s research shows that transmission engineers are in short supply nationally, and that there is no specialized training program to educate them. Instead, civil and mechanical engineers learn transmission engineering skills by gaining experience in the field, he says. If Intec is able to help craft a certification standard and training curriculum for such professionals, it would hope to bring to Spokane engineers from across the country for a six- to eight-week training program to earn the certification. The program also could be expanded to transmission “work teams,” that might include engineers, technicians, and linemen.

Intec is working with Gonzaga University to begin to create the certification program, and might also work with Eastern Washington University and Community Colleges of Spokane to broaden the program to a work-team concept, he says.

In the short term, Long says, Spokane would benefit by the spending such engineers would do while here. In a more intangible sense, the community would begin to build a reputation with energy providers nationally as a place focused on energy technologies, he contends.

That reputation, he envisions, would lead to a second phase of the effort that would include attracting energy-related applied and basic research projects to Spokane area’s colleges and universities. A third phase would be to commercialize that research, perhaps in collaboration with SIRTI and the WTC.

Intec has been seeking $1.8 million in federal funding to launch the project, but so far hasn’t been successful in getting the money, says Long. Rather than wait for a grant to materialize, however, Long says Intec now is looking to raise by next summer, about $250,000 in private funding to kick start the project. Eventually, he says, the effort should be “self-supporting,” with power providers paying to train their workers, and public and private grants being secured for research projects.

The intended end product, Long says, would be the creation of new jobs and the establishment of Spokane as a “center of excellence” in energy technology.

Long says facilitating such a center is a good role for Intec to play—both in training workers and in finding ways to create demand for more workers here.

“We were formed in different economic times,” he says. “We were founded to fill a void. Employers here were having to import a lot of talent from elsewhere because they couldn’t find the people they needed here.”

Now, creating a need for workers has become part of Intec’s mission, Long says.

Currently, Intec is funded mostly with a $1 million appropriation from the state Legislature for 2001-2003 biennium and with a two-year commitment of $575,000 from Spokane County.

With that money, Intec has been involved in a host of training-related and economic-development initiatives ranging from helping establish biotechnology degrees at the community-college level to co-sponsoring a study to assess opportunities the Spokane area might have in establishing a biosciences cluster.

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