The Regulator and the regulated: This is the first of a two-part conversation with key players in the energy debate in Kansas. First, we sit down with Andrew French, chair of the Kansas Corporation Commission. On Wednesday, we will talk to Chuck Caisley, the chief customer officer at Evergy who is often at the Capitol defending the company’s interests. Neither interview generally touched on specific policy matters now pending before the KCC, but they rather try to offer a broader view of two people who are among the key players in the energy policy debate at the Kansas statehouse.
Gov. Laura Kelly named Andrew French to the KCC in 2020. He serves as a member of the the three-member panel that regulates energy infrastructure, oil and gas production, as well as commercial trucking. At the time, French was working for Smithyman & Zakoura, representing a coalition of industrial utility consumers.
Before joining Smithyman & Zakoura, French worked for the KCC as senior litigation counsel where he represented the commission staff in proceedings before the commission. He also coordinated with outside counsel, actively engaged in settlement negotiations and advised the commission in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings.
He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Kansas law school. He earned a bachelor’s degree from KU in environmental studies.
We largely let French talk for himself, so you can get a better idea of what he’s about.
There are a few edits for clarity and brevity with some limited paraphrasing.
You worked as staffer for the Kansas Corporation Commission.
How did you get there after graduating from law school?
“It’s probably the same way most people get there. I needed a job. I came out of law school at a time right after the Great Recession and not a lot of jobs for lawyers. And so I was just applying all over the place. The KCC had an attorney position open. I interviewed and got the job before I really even realized what the KCC did. But it ended up being pretty fortuitous.
“My background was in environmental studies. In law school, I did natural resources law, energy law and probably didn’t realize that if I wanted to put that sort of academic background and my personal interests background to the most use, the KCC was probably the best place to go for that. I was pretty lucky to have gotten that job. I certainly was applying at a lot of government agencies at the time, but it ended up being a really great fit.”
Why did you major in environmental studies
as an undergraduate?
“I grew up on a family farm in Reno County just west of Hutchinson. I was always interested in sort of the environmental movement and sustainability on our farm. My parents were very involved in things like regenerative agriculture. My mother worked for an organization called the Cheney Lake Watershed Project, which helped farmers in our area implement better farming practices that would help clean up the water in Cheney Reservoir, which is Wichita’s drinking water supply. Those types of environmental issues were just always pretty deeply embedded in sort of my personal identity and what was important to me. It was an area of personal interest, and that’s why I chose that major at the University of Kansas. One of the things they don’t tell you is that major may not be the best for getting a job when you first come out of school.”
How did your undergraduate work
dovetail with your KCC work?
“A lot of what the KCC does would not be related. A lot of what we do is auditing, economics and engineering. What I was doing there was heavily legal work. But it does end up dovetailing with my environmental interests or just energy policy interests, because what we do every day, it does have some influence on those issues. We look at resource planning for an electric utility. What kinds of generating sources do you want to use to produce electric power. Do you want to use renewable energy, wind and solar? Do you want to use coal power? Do you want to use natural gas facilities? Those are the big energy policy questions around the nation right now.”
What did your work
as a KCC staffer entail?
French worked as what was known at the time as the KCC’s advisory counsel but is now known as the Office of General Counsel. In that role, French represented the commission, not the agency’s staff.
“The biggest part of that job was writing the decisions, the orders that you read that come from the commission. The general counsel attorneys, they’re the ones that advise the commission on what’s legal, what’s the evidence in this case and help them to make a decision based on the evidence and follows Kansas law and ultimately writes the order.
“If there ever was an appeal, we would be the ones to defend it. Eventually, I wanted to get more involved in litigation. I became a litigation attorney at the KCC, and that’s different because that is representing the technical staff. In these cases, I would help them develop their position. I would advise the staff on Kansas law: What would be an appropriate recommendation for them to make in the case? Is it lawful? I would help them get that position filed into the record and then at a hearing I would argue their case.”
Which of those
roles did you like more?
“They were very different positions. I think I did like the litigation position more. It let me feel like I was a little more part of the mix. You get to advocate for a position and try to put that position across the finish line. The advisory counsel position was a little more passive. It’s a more behind-the-scenes position. You’re never really the one speaking in public unless it goes on appeal. You’re just facilitating the commission to make a decision. If you’re doing your job right, you’re not really influencing that. You’re not advocating. You might advise them that the evidence is really stronger in one way or the other. But if it’s really more of a policy call, you’re not pushing the commission one way or the other. You’re pretty passive. On the litigation side, you’ve worked with the staff to develop the position that you think is in the public interest and you go out there and advocate for that. That was probably a little more fun for me. There are good aspects of both.”
Why did you leave
the KCC for private practice?
“I had reached the point of being there five and a half, six years where I knew the subject area pretty well. I wasn’t really sure what my next step was if I stayed at the agency. Some people really relish the stability of staying at the agency, being a lifelong employee of the agency. That works out great for some people. I think I was sort of interested in what the other possibilities were for my career. I knew if I stayed too long, it was going to be hard to get away. I think at that point, the move was just to go out into private practice because I knew I had some opportunities with the experience that I developed.
“There was no grand plan that I was going to go take some job and I was going to be there the rest of my career. It was, let’s go see what that life is about. I think you can become pretty insulated if you only work within the KCC building and you don’t see what it’s like to represent different interests that are outside the building. To me, there was some allure of understanding the outside perspective and maybe how people view the KCC from the outside.”
How did you end up
at Smithyman & Zakoura?
“Jim Zakoura, one the partners there, actually approached me. He reached out to me directly. I was somebody that they knew had developed experience. There are not a lot of attorneys with this specialized energy law experience. I think he had some big cases coming up that he wanted to make sure he had additional help and somebody with KCC experience on. I did an interview or two with them and ended up going there.”
Why did you want
to be a KCC commissioner?
“I had a great relationship with everybody in the building, tremendous respect for the agency. For as long as I was there, I don’t have a bad word to say about anybody on the staff. They were all fantastic people to work with, very respectful and collegial. It really is a great work atmosphere. I knew going back that I would be working with some really good people.
“I had a role writing orders for the commission but not getting to make the decision. I had a role advocating for the staff but not getting to make the decision, and then I had a role advocating for more customer interests when I was in private practice, but not getting to make the decision.
“There’s obviously an allure that, ‘Gosh, I’ve seen all my goals of this. I feel like I’ve got a lot of experience that I could bring to bear and I think it would be good for me, but also good for the agency, to bring that experience and be the decision maker.’ Not necessarily an easy decision. I was kind of choosing to leave private practice at a prime stage where my career was going to keep developing there. It just seemed like this is such an important time in energy policy, particularly with the energy transition, transitioning from more traditional fossil-based resources to renewable resources.
“It seemed like there is so much going on right now, that there wouldn’t be a better time for me to sort of be in the mix and to help make those decisions and help my state position itself so that we are not left behind, but we’re also being very careful in how we make these decisions. It was just a very interesting time in the industry, and that was alluring to me.”
What’s the difference between
representing ratepayers and being a commissioner?
“Commissioners, if we’re doing our job right, we’re not pigeonholing ourselves into favoring one interest over the other. We’re looking at the broad spectrum of all the evidence in the case and trying to come up with a solution that balances all of those interests and hopefully advances the public interest of the entire state of Kansas. It’s very rare that anybody gets all the things they’re asking for. Usually, the decision that we come out with is not going to recognize just one interest. It’s going to recognize the fact that all these interests together make up the public interest of the state of Kansas. It’s the commissioner’s job to make sure we’re properly balancing all of those.”
Do you feel uncomfortable when your
previous law firm comes before the KCC?
“No. No, not really. That’s going to be something that always comes up when you have somebody that works in private practice. We probably had people that worked in regulated industries, and they’d go from having friends that were utilities and now they’re the regulator. The key is you just have to put on a different hat and you have to hope that those that you knew on the outside that are still your friends, that they understand that I’m not there to be your friend. I’m there to call balls and strikes in a case. It doesn’t have anything to do with our personal relationship. I’m there to be a commissioner, and that’s a different role.” French noted that there is one ongoing case where he had to recuse himself.
What is your role on the joint federal-state
task force on electric transmission?
Set up by the topics related to planning and paying for transmission. French serves on the task force.
“FERC was looking at a lot of big policy issues. They were thinking about writing new regulations on a number of different issues. We internally thought that Kansas could be impacted by some of these issues they were raising. I applied to become part of this task force. We have had seven meetings now to discuss sort of a laundry list of the big national energy and transmission issues.
“It’s been a real opportunity for the states to directly engage with the FERC commissioners. I have been frankly pleasantly surprised by how much the state commissioners have been able to influence the
“Advancing the interests of the state of Kansas. Kansas sits on a very big renewable energy resource, and there’s going to have to be transmission built to harvest that and send it to the areas that want it. I see my role as not necessarily slowing something like that down, but making sure that Kansas customers are protected.
“If Chicago wants our clean-energy resource and they want those carbon-free electrons that they are paying the cost to receive that. Just making sure that there is a fair cost allocation for transmission that’s built out. A couple of topics that we’ve talked about are what are the gaps in the regulatory processes for transmission. We identified local transmission spending as something where there’s gap. It’s technically jurisdictional to the FERC, but we found out that there’s not a lot of FERC oversight.
“Another item we talked about was grid-enhancing technologies. Instead of maybe building new lines, how can you get more out of the lines you already have? That’s obviously a consumer protection component as well. How do we influence new technologies to get more out of our grid and reduce the burden on people rather than building new lines? We have also talked a lot about just a bigger concept of long-term transmission planning.
“As we look out into the future, I think everybody recognizes we’re going to have to build more grid infrastructure to support electric vehicles, electrification of lots of industries, data centers, electric vehicle battery plants. How do we look far enough out and understand the needs that are coming and optimally serve those needs. How do you look far enough out to build sort of the lowest-cost, most efficient grid that you can for what you think the future is going to look like.”
Transmission system reliability and resiliency are used often.
What do they mean to you?
“Reliability and resiliency, they’re mostly interchangeable. Resiliency gets talked a lot about with extreme weather events. To me, it’s just a component of reliability. There are things you can do on the local level to make your system more reliable and resilient. If you have aging infrastructure you can replace it with new infrastructure. You can look at new configurations that might be a little more resilient.
“On the broader transmission planning front, the big discussion is whether we should be more interconnected with our neighbors. We’re already part of the Southwest Power Pool region, but there is sort of an ongoing discussion of should that region be more interconnected with its neighbor on the East. Resilience is a big part of that conversation.
“One reason you build transmission lines is to move low-cost power around or zero-carbon power that other regions want. Another reason you might build this interregional transmission is to be able to move power when one region is short and another region might have extra power. During winter storm Uri, there were I think at least a couple days during that storm where SPP was short on power but we kept the lights on because we were able to bring power in from the East.
“We saw pretty tremendous value. We would have had many, many more hours of blackout during that event if we hadn’t been interconnected. There is sort of an ongoing conversation of: Is there value in adding more interconnection or…did that event prove that we have sort of an optimal amount because we were able to wheel in that power?”
Do you feel that
the transmission systems
in Kansas and within the Southwest Power Pool region
are reliable and resilient?
“I would say they are comparatively quite reliable and resilient. That’s not to say there aren’t improvements. In a system this complex where the needs are always changing and the future is always coming at you, you always have to be planning for the future. That’s really what our planning processes are at the Southwest Power Pool.”
Are there improvements that can be made?
French addressed this question in a global sense, not a specific state or region. “There is a discussion…about do we need to get more anticipatory in our planning processes. We seem to always be a step behind in what we think the future is going to look like. It seems like we are always probably more conservative. We have a bent to build less. Sometimes it’s been borne out that we’re pursuing less optimal solutions because we have this sort of conservative bias to not build too much. But at the end of the day, we might be building more expensive and more facilities than we actually needed. If we had done a bigger project, if we had been a little more realistic with what we thought the future was going to look like, if we had seen the electric vehicles, the electrification of lots of industries, if we can see that coming, you would probably build some bigger, more optimal investments rather than a whole bunch of smaller stuff that’s ultimately going to cost more.”
What concerns do you have about transmission systems
in Kansas or the Southwest Power Pool?
“I think that we are managing it pretty prudently. All of our transmission owners are constantly evaluating their system. There are definitely concerns with the age of our infrastructure. I know Evergy has presented that information to the Legislature and they’ve presented it to us. Very large percentages of their grid are starting to reach the end of their useful life or they’re becoming fully depreciated. I can’t speak to the exact condition of any particular investment. That’s probably something we’ll be looking at in future cases.
“But it is clear – at least on paper – there is a lot of aging infrastructure. We built a lot of our grid sort of around World War II and the years thereafter. That’s about as long you can expect assets like that to last. That is probably one of the bigger concerns. You see a lot older, wooden poles around. We want to make sure that those are maintained because reliability is job No. 1 for all of us. We also want to make sure that if we have to invest in the system to keep the grid growing, that we do it in a way that doesn’t have a negative impact on customers. It’s a big balancing act.”
Does the KCC favor utility companies over ratepayers?
“All I can tell you is that these are very complex cases with a lot of evidence. We have to see what’s presented to us, and we have to call balls and strikes. I think if you talk to the utility companies or talk to their investors, you’re probably going to hear the opposite story. The investment community, I believe, rates us as not very constructive from their perspective. I know from my position, all I can tell you is I just try to call balls and strikes. I definitely don’t come at it from a perspective of favoring one party over the other. In fact, I would say in every case if there’s reasonable case to be made that we can protect consumers and it’s within the bounds of Kansas law, it seems like the KCC tries go in that direction.”
Should members of the KCC be elected?
“That’s a policy call for the Legislature.”
How is Kansas positioned to
capitalize on federal funding for transmission?
“The biggest bucket of money they’re spending money on is the continuation of production tax credits for generation sources, new wind, new solar. That’s not something we regulate. So those companies, assuming they can go out and voluntarily acquire the land from Kansas landowners, they can locate within a state, they can take advantage of those tax benefits. Those tax benefits are going to drive them to build more wind and solar.
“It does impact us though. Because as they want to locate in Kansas, they get to interconnect to the grid. They have a right under federal law to interconnect to the transmission grid. We really need to understand what’s coming, and we can see that it’s a flood of new energy resources trying to attach to the grid, and how do you optimally plan for that at the lowest way for customers. We are impacted in the sense that we need to be planning in a very careful way that doesn’t negatively impact customers.
“There is some money that’s coming for transmission. It’s fantastic that some of our utilities have gone out and got some federal money to offset the cost of new transmission because every dollar that they get doesn’t flow into their customer bills.
“There is definitely an imbalance in the money that the administration is (directing) to new generation sources versus a relatively very small amount that they’re putting toward transmission and the grid. The grid is the big enabler. Those generation sources, they can go build but they don’t have anywhere to send their power if the grid isn’t prepared for it.
“I would have like to see the federal government devote more resources to the grid because that’s what enables everything.”
