This is certainly different. But what shouldn't be different, in this unusually challenging time? At the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the new head of external affairs is Julia Bovey, late of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Previously she was at the Conservation Law Foundation.
There's no reason a FERC external affairs chief should not come from the environmental community; external affairs is external affairs, and handling constituent groups and the media is a transferable skill. It just probably hasn't happened before at FERC, and it must reflect new Chairman Jon Wellinghoff's long-evident interest in seeing the energy industry transform itself by efficiency and renewables.
Wellinghoff not long ago said he could see a time when no new coal or nuclear plants would be necessary to power the grid and traditional "baseload" power would be an anachronism, because technology would enable deployment of a variety of clean power sources, including demand response, to operate the system reliably. He later conceded, or just explained, that he wasn't talking about right now: This was a scenario that he could envision.
FERC is entering a phase of dealing with traditional power issues -- rate cases, determining market power and the like -- in the midst of a crush created by the enormous push to replace tradition with new values and agendas. Renewable power and the transmission needed to send it to loads: Who should plan; who should pay?; who's in charge -- states, regions, FERC?
Congress will give FERC orders on some of these things, and others. But as usual some of the details will be delegated to FERC, which may have good reason to wish them away. In all of it, the external affairs office will be one of Wellinghoff's links to Congress, where New Age visions spar with more-traditional interests. It may or may not matter, but Julia Bovey comes to FERC with a point of view on issues. Not FERC issues, but power industry issues.
She was not a frequent poster at NRDC's blog, Switchboard, but one of her posts, in January, aims at "clean coal." The industry group AmericasPower, sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, promotes advanced coal-burning efforts. Bovey's take on the group is that it is "blindingly deceitful, charmingly insidious." ("Charmingly" does somehow take the edge off.) NRDC is encouraging carbon capture and storage, Bovey notes, but even then, she says, "will that make coal clean?"
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