Immediate past Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff is an internationally recognized energy law attorney and clean tech energy expert. He is co-chair of the Stoel Rives energy team.

He consults internationally to energy policy leaders in the U.S., China, Australia, and Europe, and has clients with interests worldwide. Domestically he is participating in the New York REV process initiated to reform the electric utility distribution model. Jon recently co-authored with one of his clients an article published in the Public Utilities Fortnightly describing a new structure for operating an electric distribution utility incorporating an independent system operator to better allow for the deployment of distributed energy resources like solar PV, energy efficiency and demand response to end use consumers. This market based model is patterned after the independent system operators or "ISO's" created by FERC in wholesale electric markets.

Jon represents clients in an array of emerging energy technology fields including energy storage, demand response, big energy data analytics, distributed solar PV, advanced transmission control technology, and waste heat recovery systems.

He served as General Counsel at the Nevada Public Utilities Commission (1998-2000), and served two terms as the State of Nevada's first Advocate for Customers of Public Utilities. As Consumer Advocate, he authored the first comprehensive state utility integrated planning statute. That statute became a model for utility integrated planning processes across the country. He was also the primary author of the groundbreaking Nevada Renewable Portfolio Standard Act and was one of the lead participants in developing the regulations to implement the law. He went on to assist six other states with the development of renewable portfolio standards.

During his FERC tenure, Jon worked to make the U.S. power grid cleaner and more efficient, integrating emerging resources such as renewable energy and demand response, including energy efficiency and local storage systems such as those in plug-in hybrid and all electric vehicles. He championed the agency's landmark Order 1000 which required grid planners and public utilities to coordinate regional power line projects and encouraged the integration of solar and wind installations. As Chairman, he also created FERC's Office of Energy Policy and Innovation, which is responsible for investigating and promoting new efficient technologies and practices in the energy sectors under FERC's jurisdiction, and oversaw development of the National Assessment of Demand Response Potential and the National Action Plan for Demand Response.

Jon has written and lectured extensively on numerous subjects related to energy policy and practice, including renewable project development and renewable portfolio standards; business, market, and rate structures for distribution utilities including the issues of net metering and the effects of solar PV deployment in utility distribution systems; smart grid development and integration of electric vehicles and consumer appliances into the grid; demand response, energy efficiency, and distributed generation; physical and cyber security of the grid; waste heat recovery systems; and development of licensing and hydrokinetic systems. He has given lectures at MIT, Stanford, University of California Berkeley, Harvard, and Princeton and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications and energy trade journals.

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