Leaps in Electrification and Energy: A Conversation with Michael Jewell

Michael Jewell is an attorney at Jewell & Associates, PLLC. Having been involved in Texas legislature and public policy for more than 25 years, Jewell’s work focuses primarily on representing clients before state and federal regulatory agencies addressing electricity, telecommunications, and professional regulation. He has worked with national and international corporations, including AT&T, Reliant Energy, Enel X, and Direct Energy, and has participated in the Association of Electric Companies of Texas and the Gulf Coast Power Association. In this interview, Jewell and HULR discuss how the intersection of legal, business, and technological experiences can help navigate the challenges in the energy industry at both a state and national level.

This interview was conducted in the Spring of 2024. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): What really struck us out about your background is your involvement and work across a variety of different fields, spanning business development, legislature, policy, and the regulatory space. I'm curious if you could discuss how you got interested in those fields, what drew you to them, and an overview of your career.

Michael Jewell (MJ): It was pure luck and happenstance that everything has come together the way that it has. I graduated from St. Mark's and came down to the University of Texas for Law School. I started out as a double major between mechanical engineering and Plan II, because I still love liberal arts from St. Mark's, but I also liked the technical stuff from mechanical engineering. I was one of the few people who actually tried to bring those two together in an undergrad program and really enjoyed both aspects of it until I hit thermodynamics, which is when I realized I don't like engineering that much. I ended up graduating about a year early as a result of dropping the dual degree.

A fraternity brother of mine was the son of a state representative. I had been interested in politics, and so I got a job as a Senate Messenger and worked at the Senate. That led to a position where I did research for the Board of Pardons and Parole. We worked on a sentencing disparity study –– I really enjoyed that, but wanted to get back into the Capitol. So I went back in to work for Bill Ceverha, State Representative. That's where I really got the political bug.

Because I graduated early, I had my acceptance at UT Law, but I also had an opportunity to go up to Washington and work for a national organization and state legislators. So, I did that, and ultimately decided to go back to UT for law school. While there, I still had fun with the legislature; I worked as the committee counsel for our state representative during the spring of my third year of law school.

Graduating from law school, I wanted to go with a firm where I could still work from a legislative perspective. I ended up going to Fulbright & Jaworski because the Managing Partner there was very active in the political process and lobbying. This is where the happenstance comes in; starting at Fulbright, insurance defense was the big focus at the time –– there happened to be a younger associate moving up to Chicago who did utility law with one of the partners there, and they needed somebody to help. That's how I got into utility law. At the time, there were multiple regulatory cases before the Public Utility Commission that started simultaneously due to the newly built South Texas nuclear project. At Fulbright, we represented a number of large industrials; there was one big case with regards to the South Texas nuclear project that subsequently broke up into multiple cases for each of the utilities. My case turned into nine months of the most intense litigation where our client would not settle. It was a massive, knock-down, drag-out fight. With tens of thousands of pages of transcripts, it was baptism by fire. I really got into understanding utility law, and that’s how I got into dealing with electric utility. I stayed with Fulbright for a little over five years.

When I got into this utility mess, I got pulled away from all the legislative material. I really had wanted to be able to get back on to legislative work; in 1996, there was an opening in the Governor's office, where they wanted somebody who had been practicing electric utility law to help them draft a bill for reforming the Texas electric utility market. I was actually up for Partner that year and instead decided to walk away from the firm and take a massive pay cut to go work for the Governor for a temporary position. A lot of people thought that I was nuts, but it ended up being a lot of fun. That bill coughed and sputtered but ended up passing the next session.

Coming out of the legislature, there was a position at AT&T that one of my co-workers from Fulbright who had gone in-house had recommended. The role involved providing regulatory and legal support to the lobby tape during legislative sessions. Ultimately, I got promoted and was put in charge of AT&T’s lobby team. As times changed, it was becoming clear that there was going to be a merger where one of the Baby Bells was going to buy AT&T. One of the business unit clients at AT&T who was heading up their consumer operations for North America asked me to come over and start a government affairs operation for Texas, so that's what brought me back into the electric industry. Afterwards, I went back to do a government affairs practice and Haynes and Boone for a while, but law firms and lobbying practices don't mesh really well. And so after a couple of years, we decided it was time to part ways; that's when I went out and have been practicing on my own ever since.

Jewell & Associates was my dad's firm, and so when I set up my own shop, I took the name. He had retired by that point, so I brought the name back, which I think he really appreciated. With different demand response and solar companies reaching out to me, over the years, what developed was a clean energy practice. I represent solar companies that develop, own, and operate solar, wind, and now utility-scale storage, working on one transmission line that'll go from Texas over into the southeast United States.

More recently, I got to meet a guy who had been doing a lot of work on distributed energy resources, rooftop wind, and solar storage in Australia, Ireland, Germany, and other countries. He had this idea about developing something for distributed energy resources to integrate them into the market, so we – that is, Chris Hickman, Richard Beeson, and myself – started two companies. One is a nonprofit creating a DER registry – a central repository of information that you need to have in place in order to manage these types of resources. And then the other company is Creation Energy, which focuses on the deployment of rooftop solar and storage load management services, real new technology, energy-efficient technology, that can all be operated in a totally different way than anybody operates them today to actually help the grid. We are on the very front end of both of those companies right now. We've got our first deployment project scheduled for up in Oklahoma here in the next quarter or two; we're talking to some utilities right now about potential contracts.

HULR: That's incredibly interesting, thanks so much for that background. What a unique story there – I definitely want to get more into that distributed energy and energy efficiency space. Before this interview, I was listening to one of your podcasts from August 2021 with the Energy Crossroads. It was after the 2020 winter storm in Texas and you said that distributed energy is the next thing that we can have to work towards – especially since Texas is still grounded in coal and natural gas – and that the clean energy transition would be essential to maintain stable future. I'm curious, has that really made a big impact on how you're looking at that space today?

MJ: Absolutely. When you look at the Texas grid today, Texas has become such a magnet for a lot of different industries to come in. Governor Abbott put a welcome mat for Bitcoin. You've got a lot of Bitcoin miners that have moved to the state, a lot of data centers that are moving into the state right now because of the development of artificial intelligence and the growth of the internet, all of which demand massive data centers. Now we have hydrogen coming in, and Texas is uniquely positioned for the growth of the new green hydrogen industry. All of this means we need a massive amount of new electric supply –– you can't build the grid fast enough. You're going to have to take advantage of distributed energy resources, look at demand response opportunities, and use flexible load to help balance the grid. Fundamentally, there also needs to be a new focus on energy efficiency to avoid cataclysmic events like Winter Storm Uri, or massive issues that happen in the summer due to our old air conditioning systems and old heat pumps. It's amazing when you look at the growth of the electric consumption in Texas; during the most difficult hours to have enough electricity generation to meet load, 40% of it is simply from residential air conditioning.

HULR: It makes total sense, especially in the Texas summer.

MJ: Exactly. Being able to address that becomes a massive opportunity for the state, but you end up with natural tensions that occur from generators that want to generate solar electricity versus transmission and distribution utilities that want to sell electricity. Do they really want to save electricity? Not really. But do we want to have rotating outages? No. There's so many different forces that can come together in –– for lack of a better word –– fighting each other because of different business opportunities and strategies. But the opportunity on the distribution grid is massive; with some of the opportunities we're talking about, we can cut 40-60% of the technical losses on the grid.

HULR: Super interesting. In your own practice, how do you handle those conflict-of-interest situations where people have different business strategies misaligned with what people demand in terms of electricity as an attorney and as someone who's working in that legal, regulatory and legislative space?

MJ: It's a weird space because it depends on the person and how they approach it. I like to find win-win solutions because, to me, the pie is so big that there's a seat at the table for everybody, and we need everybody. For example, I represent different battery companies. There's one company that's long duration storage, other companies that have much shorter duration storage. Frankly, from the perspective of the long duration storage companies, you want the short-duration batteries to work and be accepted politically because that's laying the groundwork for the long duration storage businesses to then enter the market. And so that's how I harmonized those clients.

I represent the Solar Energy Industries Association. And that has had large utility-scale storage as well as distributed rooftop solar. Large solar and small solar are two groups that have always tended to fight each other. And the point I’ve made with them is that the utility scale businesses need rooftop solar to succeed politically because they’re serving voters who vote for politicians, who ultimately decide the opportunity for growth in the utility scale market. I think that that's where my legislative background made a difference because it hinged on finding ways to bring disparate people together on a solution rather than continuing to fight each other.

HULR: That makes a lot of sense, and that strikes me as one of the super interesting things about your background, the fact that you've had so many of these experiences across different fields. Shifting towards some of the work that you're doing at your own firm, you mentioned earlier that you’ve been focused on the clean energy and energy transition space. What are some trends that you're seeing right now, and has there been a favorite project of yours so far?

MJ: There's so much change going on in the industry. Right now, the hottest issue is hydrogen and the development of clean hydrogen. I'm starting to help some businesses that are working on the development of those projects. It's a natural outgrowth of the work that I have been doing with wind and solar because green hydrogen relies on wind and solar. But it also brings in storage because utility-scale storage could aid hydrogen production during lulls in renewable production.

One of the interesting dynamics that I've seen over the last couple of years is that batteries started to come to the forefront. We had one battery down towards the border that got installed years ago. The amount of growth that has happened since then has really been fascinating. It's been fun to help companies that are working on the deployment of batteries and the rules for how they participate in the market. Because when you think about the rules of the electric industry, they really were structured around your traditional thermal generators, gas, coal, nuclear. And so as we bring new resources to the table, you can't put a square peg in a round hole; the new technologies don't necessarily fit with what the old requirements are. So, a lot of it is working with regulators and grid operators to figure out how to make this all work together. Simultaneously, you have the incumbent providers that do not really appreciate the competition. So, they're working on continuing to keep that hole round so that it works for them and not allowing a square peg to go in there.

I find that working on the storage issues has been a lot of fun. I've done a lot of work over the years with regards to demand response and energy management by companies and customers so that they are relieving stress on the grid. A lot of the time, most people, especially elected officials, think solely about electricity generation, but there’s two sides of the equation. The fundamental equation with the electric market is supply has to equal demand at all times. Supply is 50% of the equation, demand is the other 50%. The more that you look at managing demand so that it works better with your generation, the more you can get greater efficiencies out of both.

There's a lot of work that I've done to help demand response become a bigger part of the electric market. For example, there's actually a proposal that just got filed last month which would be making a small change with regard to the expectation of certain loads. There remains a relic of traditional thermal generation that does not need to be applied to loads. It's a relatively small change, but it will open up the opportunity for more consuming customers to be able to help the market rather than being kept out of the market because of a regulatory requirement. That was the call that I was doing just before I hopped on here.

HULR: I think it's really interesting that you get to see both sides from the supply and demand perspectives. One thing we talked about earlier was that demand, especially in areas like telecommunications and data centers, is big right now because AI generation needs so much data for those bigger companies to run new developments. So I'm curious what that has looked like for you since you've had experience in both the energy and telecommunication sectors.

MJ: The development of data centers is growing by leaps and bounds; it is a fascinating opportunity because we need it from an economic perspective. With all the development going on, we need to be able to have the systems here in the country in order to be able to support it. The hard part about such installations is they are becoming so big. And there is an interesting dynamic here that can become a problem; I can develop and build a 500-megawatt data center to run all of these computers, the equivalent of several gas-fired power plants. But I also need a transmission line to connect to that new data center. I can build the data center in two years whereas it takes five years to connect. As such, we have a disconnect with regards to the time of construction.

There was a bill that we worked on last year. Last session, it was recognized that with this large data center load, the transmission companies would have to be able to start thinking ahead of where the load is heading so that they could start the planning and construction before that load even starts to start its construction. There's still this dance going on right now on how to implement that legislation. Because what the wire company spends on building this new transmission line is ultimately coming out of everybody's pockets, so you don't want the wire companies to go out and build more than they need. But we do need them to be a little more proactive. How do you get them to be proactive enough so that you don’t end up with a bridge going nowhere? We want the transmission lines to be going to a place where they're going to be used. That was the subject of discussion earlier this week. They're trying this new planning methodology to be more forward-looking, but there is a real tension there.

HULR: From your perspective, having seen different trends throughout the years, what do you think is going to be the solution going forward?

MJ: I'm a big fan of all of the above and below. I'm not a big fan of burning coal. We need more wind, more solar, more nuclear, more storage. Geothermal is now starting to get a lot of attention. You can build any one of these areas quickly enough to meet the potential demand. We need to be building all of it and looking forward to all of it.

I think we're going to see a lot more focus on nuclear energy as the research on fusion continues to move forward, but that's still going to take a while. There's a lot of focus on minimizing costs on building small modular nuclear reactors, for example. When you think about data centers, there's actually an opportunity of building nuclear and data centers simultaneously because they need each other, so I think you may see some more of that coming together. One of the clients I've been working with for several years is working on long-duration energy storage, which will be a game-changer. They are building their factory for the commercial production of their technology. Soon, they'll start rolling out batteries that are 100-hour duration batteries.

And lastly, hydrogen. The interesting thing about hydrogen is that a lot of times, people are thinking about hydrogen as simply bringing forward clean molecules for fuel or fertilizer and other processes. But hydrogen is a form of energy storage as well. You can take low-cost wind and solar, generate hydrogen, and put the hydrogen in a place to store it. And it's not a 100-hour duration; it’s months of duration of saving that energy for when you need it. Being able to harness this fundamental change in the electric industry on a grid-scale basis has the potential to be a big change.

HULR: That’s very insightful, super interesting. One final question looping back to the beginning of our conversation to a lot of the different experiences you've had. You mentioned that you have either followed people you knew or someone asked you to go out and try something new or take a risk. How has that contributed to your career and how you build relationships with clients and the people you work with today?

MJ: I appreciate so much all the help that I've received, all the guidance that I've received, and I want to pass it forward. As all of us are working through new things, there's help that we don’t know we need. And I like being one of those people to be there to help somebody just for free. I appreciate that people did that for me, and I think that I can do that for other people. So every now and then somebody will ask "Why are you working for them for free?" And it’s because they just need a little bit of help. That's okay. Maybe something will come out of it in the future, maybe not. But in the meantime, I'm happy to go ahead and help and I think that that's one of the things that I've really learned over the years: the value of helping other people and being willing to accept help, as well.

HULR: Absolutely. Michael, thank you so much for your time and insight. It was amazing to hear from you.