Davis Wright Tremaine, a Seattle-based transactional and litigation firm, has announced the appointment of a lawyer with energy regulatory expertise as the firm’s new managing partner, effective on January 1, 2015.
Jeffrey Gray, a former partner-in-charge of the firm’s San Francisco office, takes over from incumbent managing partner Dave Baca, who has held the role for the past six years. Baca will remain at the firm following the transition, though he will not practice law full-time.
Gray’s experience includes representing the interests of independent power producers before the California Public Utilities Commission, advising electricity generators and service providers on power purchase agreements, representing clients in general utility rate cases, and providing counsel to municipal utilities in the purchase of generation and distribution assets, among other matters.
“The base of our energy practice is really California and the Northwest, with a presence in Washington, D.C.,” Gray commented in a discussion with IFLR1000. “What is going on in California with respect to greenhouse gas reduction has positioned us well in the western U.S. and in Washington to provide an interesting value proposition for our energy clients.”
Gray described the biggest challenge in the energy regulatory space as ensuring transmission grid reliability in the face of significant amounts of variable renewable generation coming onto the grid.
“The independent system operators needs to figure out how to leverage the inherent flexibility in natural gas-fired resources,” he said. “At some point in the future, there will be an increased role for storage demand response and energy efficiency. There’s a huge unknown with respect to the question, When you have more and more generation, how do you ensure reliability on the transmission grid? The independent system operators don’t have the visibility on the distribution grid that they do on the transmission side. These are questions that need to be solved, but there are also a lot of opportunities going forward.”