PURA chairwoman wants to deliver ‘value’ for what we pay utilities
An outsider nearly 18 months ago, Marissa Gillett is fast becoming the authority lawmakers are leaning on as they weigh policy changes to ensure a more affordable and reliable electric grid.
Now, when many want a sheriff to lay down the law for the state’s utilities, Gillett, chairwoman of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, has a far better grasp of how far forward to push on that frontier of regulatory oversight.
“Realistically, it’s going to take Connecticut years to establish the rules and regulatory environment that bring us into alignment with our peers,” said Gillett, a former senior advisor to the chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media.
“I don’t want to promise that our price per kilowatt hour is going to drop … us in the rankings,” she said. “But where we are going to have to focus is on delivering value for what we are paying, and I think that comes with creating industries (like) energy storage and electric vehicles and all the things we have identified in the grid modernization docket.”
Gillett said the long-term benefits of those would outweigh the risks and short-term costs and, when her term is up in January 2024, she would like to see a “market that we can start to wean off of state incentives.”
From adding a focus on public outreach to recruiting more lawyers, Gillett has already made some significant changes to the way the regulatory authority functions — and how aggressive and public facing it is. “PURA is a quasi-judicial agency, and when I showed up we had four lawyers,” she said.
Her second year on the job has brought major disruptions that exposed the shortcomings of the state’s electric grid, including the mass outages of Tropical Storm Isaias and hot days that forced families to amp up the air conditioning while stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
Through all of this, Gillett has yet to take a break, with Isaias postponing a planned family vacation and most days stretching 12 hours or more.
The Connecticut General Assembly is now readying a new law to force Eversource and Avangrid to be better prepared for the next storm, against the threat of contributing some of their profits if the utilities are not.
Gillett and two fellow PURA commissioners will decide on any immediate outcomes, having already approved a temporary rollback of an agreement approved by Gov. Ned Lamont in April last year for Connecticut ratepayers to chip in more for electricity generated by the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford.
Gillett is also well familiar with the intersection of federal and state energy policy. She worked extensively on a U.S. Supreme Court case pitting Maryland against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the question of a new power plant.
‘A complex job’
There is now a debate on whether the ISO New England nonprofit, approved by FERC two decades ago, is failing Connecticut in its core role of ensuring that electricity is produced and delivered reliably and affordably.
Rep. David Arconti, DDanbury, said Gillett’s background with the Maryland Public Service Commission has brought a needed outside perspective to the questions of how Connecticut should move ahead. And Gillett has prior experience with the particularly thorny questions of nuclear power; Maryland’s second largest electric generator is the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant on the west shore of Chesapeake Bay.
“Having the experience she brings from her time with the Maryland (commission) has been great,” said Arconti, co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. “It has been helpful to learn how other jurisdictions regulate their utilities and do rate making, and how we can mirror some of those regulations and policies.”
PURA Commissioner Jack Betkowski III said Lamont was looking for someone to chair PURA with experience in another jurisdiction. Betkowski expressed confidence in Gillett’s expertise and approach in handling the immense workload that PURA generates from some 200 active dockets at any point in time.
“It’s a very complex job,” Betkowski said. “Over the last two decades or more... the regulatory world has changed dramatically.”
Gillett spent the largest part of her career with the Maryland Public Service Commission, after growing up in Prince William County, Va., southwest of Washington, D.C. Her parents ran a mechanical and plumbing engineering company, giving her an early interest in math and technology.
Gillett studied bioengineering at Clemson University, but ended up pursuing a career in law with the goal of becoming a patent attorney. The Maryland Public Service Commission — the state’s PURA equivalent — posted an internship opportunity. Gillett spent a summer clearing a backlog of consumer complaints, then was hired in the role of an advisor.
She was subsequently promoted to the position of senior advisor to the chairman, initially for New Haven native and Yale University graduate Douglas Nazarian who went on to become a Maryland appellate court judge.
Nuclear winter in Connecticut
Having gotten exposure to other big initiatives such as offshore wind and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Gillett was hired by the Energy Storage Association whose CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman served a four-year stint as a Maryland PSC commissioner.
“She was offering me a position that focused on education and research and communications, which was a different set of skills than I used at the Maryland commission, where I focused on policy and legal work,” Gillett said. “So I did a 180 and went ... to work for someone I believed in.”
Speakes-Backman remembers well her first encounter with Gillett, on her first day on the job at the Baltimore tower where PSC has its main office.
“I was anxious and nervous and didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “This woman got on the elevator right before it closed and said, ‘You’re Commissioner Kelly Speakes-Backman . ... I’m Marissa Gillett — and you’re stuck with me.’
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Speakes-Bachman added. “She’s funny and she’s smart and she gets jobs done . ... I have no doubt that she’ll get things on the right path.”
At ESA, Gillett came to become familiar with Connecticut’s leading policymakers on energy while working on the Regional Greenhouse
Gas Initiative and other efforts, including Katie Dykes, who stepped down as PURA chair in 2018 to become commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Dykes reached out to Gillett to let her know Connecticut was looking for a new PURA commissioner.
Gillett found the opportunity appealing both in a return to policy and in Connecticut’s ongoing efforts to modernize the grid. She was offered the job in March 2019, and arrived at the end of April, with Betkowski and fellow commissioner Michael Caron electing her PURA chair that June.
At that point, Lamont’s signature was still drying on a new power purchase agreement with Millstone Power Station and owner Dominion Energy, which had floated the possible shutdown of the plant as Eversource and United Illuminating increased purchases of cheaper electricity from natural gas plants.
Tensions of the job
Gillett had already made the grid her first priority upon arriving at PURA, pulling all-nighters a year ago on ideas for smart meters and other advances, with Eversource and United Illuminating responding in July with proposals to move ahead.
Those proposals arrived even as Gillett completed an overhaul of PURA’s organization, reducing the number of direct reports from 11 to five overseeing public outreach and enforcement; utility regulation; innovation; legal affairs; and legislative affairs and communications.
Gillett said the public outreach function was particularly needed, with those personnel not having active roles in dockets and so able to speak freely with members of the public.
“Everyone in that office is ‘fire-walled’ from the rest of PURA on substantive matters,” Gillett said. “You can call them up and ask them a question — they can’t speculate how PURA’s going to rule, but they are still part of the PURA umbrella. I am hopeful that that over time is going to prove a very meaningful addition.”
She said people are often confused about PURA’s role in regulating utilities.
“I want to be accountable, but I also want people to understand that there’s a statutory body dedicated to representing consumers — that would be DEEP,” she said. “Our statutory role is not to be an advocate for customers — we’re charged with balancing the interests, and you don’t want your judge to also be your prosecutor, for a lot of reasons.”
Gillett has been vocal about wanting any newcomers to include an executive director to take over day-to-day operations so she can focus on the decisions pending in the hundreds of dockets that require her full attention. Arconti expressed support for more personnel, while saying any such decision would have to come from Lamont’s budget team.
Knee-deep in the electric proceedings and agency overhaul, Gillett gets an additional chore in October when Norwalk-based Frontier returns before PURA to get approval for its plan to emerge from bankruptcy, after filing for Chapter 11 protection from creditors last April owing some $17 billion.
Her family has already paid its dues for the roundthe-clock requirements of having a PURA chair in the house. She and spouse Phil — he teaches biology in Glastonbury — dispatched their 4-year-old twin daughters for a month to their grandparents in North Carolina, allowing Gillett to focus fully on the slate of Eversource and United Illuminating hearings.
The Gillett family was back together in early September with the kids clearing Connecticut’s quarantine requirements as part of their return for enrollment in preschool.
“It has been a whirlwind,” Gillett said, reflecting on her first year and a half on the job. “I think, unfortunately, it’s going to take me through the end of my term to realistically have the kind of impact that we are looking for. ... I don’t know if I want another term as chair, but if I look around in January 2024 and I haven’t laid the groundwork for that to be the case then I wouldn’t seek another term. What am I doing here if I can’t make that kind of impact?”