Public Power - November/December 2007 - (Page 12)

10 QUESTIONS ALAN H. RICHARDSON Alan Richardson with then-Rep. Albert Gore Jr. and Alex Radin, then executive director of APPA. . . .with Alex Radin and Larry Hobart in 1986. Hobart succeeded Radin as CEO of APPA in 1986. with Senator Gordon Smith, R-Ore. 1 APPA President & CEO Alan Richardson will retire at the end of 2007. He has worked at APPA since March 1977 and has been CEO since July 1995. Jeanne LaBella interviewed him on Sept. 10, 2007. What did you know and think about the public power industry when you first joined the APPA staff in 1977? Little and almost nothing. When I interviewed for the job, both Alex Radin and Larry Hobart explained to me what pubic power was and how it operated. I was very intrigued by the concept. I thought, this is really neat. It’s consumer-oriented and not-for-profit and it’s pretty consistent with my views about how utilities, in particular, should be run. I had a good friend on Capitol Hill who worked for the Energy and Commerce Committee. He was familiar with APPA and thought it was an excellent organization. I respected him, so his recommendation that APPA would be a good place to work because of what and who it represented was important as well. From your earliest days at APPA and throughout your three decades here, you have been deeply involved in legislative issues. Which lobbying experiences or legislative battles do you consider the most triumphant for public power? One of the ones that I’m most pleased about is the Clean Renewable Energy Bonds provision that was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This gives not-for-profit utilities financial incentives to invest in certain renewable NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2007 energy resources that were intended to be roughly comparable to the renewable energy production tax credits available to for-profit corporations. We’ve fought for some kind of comparability in incentives for development of renewable energy sources for community-owned public power systems and not-for-profit utilities for decades and we finally succeeded in 2005. So I was very pleased with that. I’m disappointed that it was flawed in both its drafting and in its administration, but we’re well on our way to correcting those problems. 3 And I’m also proud of APPA’s legislative efforts to prevent the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. We preserved that act far longer than most people thought possible. It was ultimately repealed in 2005. I believe we will come to regret that action. Which lobbying battles do you look back on with greatest regret or frustration? Probably three. One would be the preference in hydro relicensing. It was a very difficult battle. I think we were absolutely right that Congress did We’d worked for decades to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission specific authority to order transmitting utilities to provide transmission access to third parties. The transmission access provisions in the 1992 Energy Policy Act were also something I’m very proud of. Again, we’d worked for decades to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission specific authority to order transmitting utilities to provide transmission access to third parties. We had tried and failed, essentially, to obtain the same result in 1978, which was the year after I came to APPA. We got legislation that was very similar to [the 1992 law] but it had so many caveats and restrictions on FERC’s exercise of authority that it turned out to be meaningless victory. provide a preference in the relicensing of hydro projects to public agencies when it enacted the Federal Water Power Act in 1920, just as it had provided a preference to public agencies for initial licenses. However, when some public agencies attempted to exercise that preference, we were faced with a huge public relations problem. The issue was not seen as one of competition for a license to utilize a public resource, the energy capacity of our nation’s rivers. It was instead seen as an attempt to take a dam built by one utility and give it to another. While we could demonstrate the benefits of PUBLIC POWER 2 12

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - November/December 2007

Public Power - November/December 2007 Contents Washington Focus 10 Questions Connecting with the Customer Through Automation AMR or AMI? The High Court’s Antitrust Thunderbolts California’s Push for Demand-Response Plug-In Partners Get Plugged In Wiring Up for Double-Digit Growth For Engineers Safety Community Broadband For Governing Boards DEED Customer Service Hometown Connections Index to Advertisers Parting shot

Public Power - November/December 2007

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