Avista's Ecova Acquires Broker, Energy Manager Prenova

Ecova, the recently rebranded Advantage IQ, has announced its intent to acquire Prenova, Inc., a privately-held enterprise energy management company headquartered in Atlanta.

In addition to its energy and building management services, Prenova also offers commodity procurement brokering and consulting.

Terms were not disclosed.

The transaction is expected to close before the end of the year, and is expected to be funded by Ecova and to be neutral to Ecova's earnings in 2012. Ecova is a subsidiary of Avista Corp.

Prenova reported revenue of $12.4 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2011.

With more than 80 clients, Prenova grows Ecova's existing client base to more than 600, and expands the company's reach into the education and government sectors.

"Prenova's clients, employee expertise and real-time products are significant additions to our company," said Jeff Heggedahl, CEO of Ecova. "We look forward to providing the best offerings from both companies' portfolios to our clients, and believe our unique combination of technology, expertise and data is unmatched."

Ecova said that the acquisition enhances its combination of historical data from utility expense management services and real-time building management services. The acquisition builds Ecova's engineering capabilities in building control and metering, providing clients with energy efficiency expertise and recommendations at the building level.

Jeff Heggedahl will lead the combined organization and the Atlanta office will become Ecova's South Eastern regional office.

Today, Prenova has over 45,000 commercial and industrial buildings under management with 7,500 buildings connected on a real-time basis for a range of services. Real-time operations are served from a network operations center in Atlanta leveraging SaaS technology, enabling clients to monitor and control energy consumption within their own portfolio of buildings across an array of disparate energy management systems.