Speaker biographies

Parviz M. Adib is director of APX, Inc., where he consults on power market and environmental market activities. Mr. Adib is an expert on the restructured electricity market within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power region and closely follows the evolution of electricity market design around the world. Before joining APX, Mr. Adib worked at the Public Utility Commission of Texas for twenty-one years, and he performed the duties of the ERCOT market monitor for six years before retiring in September 2007. In that position, Mr. Adib played a key role in the design of the competitive electricity market, monitored market activities, and advised the commission on emerging issues and market rules that govern the operation of competitive electricity markets. Earlier in his career, Mr. Adib taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Texas at Austin and worked as a research associate in the Bureau of Business Research at the university. He was also the chairman of the Energy Intermarket Surveillance Group, an organization that includes market monitoring units  in various electricity markets in the United States and around the world.

Timothy Brennan is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future and a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also taught at George Washington University and served as an economist for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. From 1996 to 1997, Mr. Brennan served as a senior economist for the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on regulation, industrial organization, and antitrust matters. From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Brennan served as a staff consultant to the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission. He is the coauthor of Alternating Currents: Electricity and Public Policy, which looks at the complex economic and regulatory policy issues raised by the restructuring of the electricity industry.

Gürcan Gülen is a senior energy economist at the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. The center coauthored the first edition of the Guide to Electric Power in Texas with the Houston Advanced Research Center in 1998 to assist with discussions before Senate Bill 7 in May 1999 restructured the Texas electricity market. Mr. Gülen participated in writing the second and third editions of the guide and worked with the Public Utility Commission of Texas to produce a public education document on the competitive electricity market in Texas before the market opened in January 2002. He led a research project on the progress of competition, including interviews and workshops with market participants. Mr. Gülen continues to research, write, and lecture on the policy, regulation, and economics of competitive electricity markets around the world, often using the Texas market as a comparative benchmark.

Lynne Kiesling is a senior lecturer in the department of economics and in the Social Enterprise at Kellogg program in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is also a faculty member in the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and a faculty affiliate in the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization at Northwestern. Ms. Kiesling is the author or coauthor of many academic journal articles, book chapters, policy studies, and public interest comments, most of which analyze electricity policy and market design issues. Her specialization is experimental economics and organizational economics. She also teaches undergraduate courses in energy economics, environmental economics, and history of economic thought, and she writes about economics at KnowledgeProblem.com. Ms. Kiesling is a member of the GridWise Architecture Council, a group of thirteen experts volunteering their time to articulate the guiding principles for an intelligent, transactive energy system of the future, and to guide and promote measures to transform the nation’s electricity system into a more reliable, affordable, secure network in which users collaborate with suppliers in an information- and value-rich market environment. She has previously worked at the College of William and Mary, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the Reason Foundation, and the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science at George Mason University.

Andrew Kleit is a professor of energy and environmental economics and chair of the energy business and finance program at Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Kleit is the author or editor of five books and the author of over seventy articles, including publications in the Journal of Law and Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Texas Law Review, the Antitrust Bulletin, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Resource and Energy Economics, Energy Studies Review, and The Energy Journal. He is also the editor of Electric Choice: Deregulation and the Future of Electric Power. Prior to becoming an academic, Mr. Kleit was economic adviser to the director of the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission and senior economic adviser to the director for investigation and research on antitrust in Canada. Mr. Kleit was named one of the top competition economists in the world by Global Competition Review (London) in 1998, 2000, and 2002.

Mark J. Niefer is a trial attorney in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. Since joining the division, he has worked on a number of matters involving industrial equipment, media, airlines, agriculture, and electricity. His work on electricity has included coauthoring regulatory filings at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concerning utility reporting requirements and market transparency; testifying before the commission on the division’s approach to merger analysis; and leading several investigations of electricity mergers, including the division’s investigation of the Exelon-PSEG merger that ended with the filing of a consent decree requiring divestiture of several generating plants. Prior to joining the antitrust division, Mr. Niefer was an economist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he conducted research related to the effect of new technology on productivity and energy consumption.

Henry Olsen is a vice president and director of the National Research Initiative (NRI) at AEI. He disseminates and publicizes the Institute’s work to the academic community; works with AEI’s visiting, adjunct, and NRI research fellows; commissions and supervises NRI projects; and oversees the production of NRI publications. Mr. Olsen previously served as vice president for programs at the Manhattan Institute and as a judicial clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Danny J. Boggs.

Richard P. O'Neill is the chief economic adviser at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 1988 to 2000, he was the chief economist and director of the office of economic policy and was previously the director of the commission’s Office of Pipeline and Producer Regulation. His work has focused on open access, restructuring, competition, performance-based incentive regulation, and market design. Mr. O’Neill has worked with several countries, states, the World Bank, energy companies, and computer companies in the development of mathematical software, energy modeling, forecasting, regulation, privatization, restructuring, and market design. His published work has appeared in academic and professional journals and books in the areas of applied mathematics, optimization, operations research, management science, computer science, energy, electrical engineering, economics, and law.

Shmuel Oren is the Earl J. Isaac Chair Professor in the department of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California at Berkeley and is the Berkeley site director of the Power System Engineering Research Center. He has twenty-five years of academic and consulting experience in the electric power industry and has published numerous articles on aspects of electricity market design. Mr. Oren has been a consultant to many private and government organizations in the United States and abroad. He is currently an adviser to the market oversight division of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, to the energy division of the California Public Utility Commission, and to the market monitor of ISO-NE.

Stephen L. Puller is an assistant professor in the department of economics at Texas A&M University. He specializes in the field of industrial organization and has recently investigated a variety of topics in energy and environmental policy. Mr. Puller’s research on the electricity industry has focused on the impacts of restructuring policies on market competitiveness and both consumer and firm welfare. In addition to his academic duties at Texas A&M, he has served as a visiting research associate at the University of California Energy Institute and an adviser to the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

Eric S. Schubert is director of regulatory affairs, ERCOT, for BP Energy Company. His professional experience includes working at the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Research and Planning Consultants, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Bankers Trust Company. During his tenure at the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Mr. Schubert was project leader in commission proceedings involving wholesale market design and resource adequacy issues in ERCOT. Mr. Schubert has authored articles on wholesale market design and resource adequacy issues with a focus on the evolution of electricity deregulation in a policy setting.

David B. Spence is an associate professor of law, politics, and regulation at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Mr. Spence’s research focuses on regulation and the regulatory process, particularly with respect to energy and environmental regulation. He is coauthor of the leading textbook on energy law and has published widely on energy and environmental and administrative law topics in scholarly journals, including the Cornell Law Review, the California Law Review, The Journal of Legal Studies, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among others.  Mr. Spence has been teaching regulatory law and policy courses at the University of Texas at Austin since 1997 and has also taught at the Harvard Law School, the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, the Cornell Law School, the Vanderbilt University School of Law, the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Management, Edinburgh University (Scotland), IMADEC University (Austria), and the Monterrey Technical Institute (Mexico).

Jess Totten is the director of the competitive markets division for the Public Utility Commission of Texas. He previously served in policy development and attorney positions at the commission. His principal duty since 1999 has been managing the implementation of the Texas retail competition law. Mr. Totten has also worked to develop legislation and commission policy relating to retail and wholesale competition and renewable energy and participated in proceedings concerning wholesale competition, rates, licensing of facilities, and resource planning. Prior to joining the commission, he served as an attorney and deputy general counsel for the Panama Canal Commission.

Nat Treadway is a founding member of the Distributed Energy Financial Group, LLC, a specialized consulting firm focused on innovative energy technologies and solutions. Mr. Treadway has long been a champion of small-scale energy resources. In the 1980s, he was a testifying staff economist for the Texas Public Utility Commission on energy efficiency programs and integrated resource planning. In the 1990s, he advised the Texas commissioners on the separation of competitive, on-site energy services from regulated electric distribution service. He then headed the effort that led to interconnection rules for distributed generation in Texas. As a consultant for a microturbine manufacturer, he recommended reforms in California and Texas. Earlier this year, Mr. Treadway helped organize the Texas CHP Initiative, a business group committed to the promotion of combined heat and power. Mr. Treadway also leads the effort by competitive energy retailers to benchmark the progress of states in opening retail energy markets to competition.

Pat Wood III, an energy infrastructure developer, is former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Public Utility Commission of Texas. In his regulatory career in the natural gas, transportation, telecommunications, and power industries, Mr. Wood was a forceful advocate for replacing government-centered energy regulation with a market-based approach. Mr. Wood believes that robust infrastructure is essential for energy markets to work well, so today his project development focus is on clean power generation, independent power transmission, and natural gas facilities. Mr. Wood is driving an effort to build power transmission into the Texas Panhandle to attach eight thousand megawatts of wind, gas, and coal generation. He led the North American Advisory Board of Airtricity, an international wind energy firm. He also serves as a strategic adviser to Natural Gas Partners, a private equity firm, and is an independent director of two public companies: SunPower, a solar technology company, and Quanta Services, a utility infrastructure contractor. 

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