GreenBeat 2009, The Conference on the Smart Grid

Pamela Lesh offers consulting in business and regulatory strategy and systems approaches to opportunity creation and problem solving through her company, Graceful Systems LLC. She recently completed work as a Senior Advisor to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), on loan to that organization from Portland General Electric (PGE), for which she was Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Strategic Planning. At NRDC, she worked on national energy policy issues of importance to electric utilities, including a major review of the results of decoupling policies nationwide. This work supported her focus for the last few years on transforming the means by which United States residents and businesses apply energy to meet personal and economic needs to ones that are sustainable for the country and the world, and ensuring that the current U.S. electric utilities have an opportunity to be full and willing partners in this transformation. She will continue with that focus through Graceful Systems.

Pamela Lesh has worked in the electric utility industry for over 20 years. During this time, her responsibilities included management of all aspects of state and federal economic regulation, resource planning, federal legislative affairs, and corporate communications. Economic regulation spans matters from rate setting to approval of mergers and acquisitions to tariff design. Pamela Lesh also managed strategy development for PGE. She specializes in perceiving the context within which a business or regulatory strategy will exist and developing multiple paths to the objective, and excels at written and oral communication of the ideas, paths, and strategies so developed. Pamela Lesh holds a B.S. from Washington State University and a J.D. from The University of Washington School of Law. She has authored articles on integrated resource planning, decoupling and deregulation and spoken at numerous conferences on regulatory policy and utility strategy. Pamela Lesh also serves as a Board member for the Volunteers of America of Oregon and the Portland State University Institute of Metropolitan Studies.