Jennifer Fordham

Describe your industry experience:
Extensive energy sector experience across the entire value chain from producer/supplier, pipeline/transport, utility and consumer.  Comprehensive understanding of utility and industrial sector energy procurement strategies and portfolio development.  Experience advising management teams on regulatory risk, compliance, energy procurement bidding strategies and infrastructure development policy and market risks.  Proven ability to build strategic alliances with other industries and an ability to establish companies as policy thought-leaders.  In short, I manage corporate exposure to energy and environmental policy uncertainty to create commercial advantage and reduce risk.

Describe your functional experience:
Advise corporate leaders on commercially-significant, emerging policy and regulatory trends in the energy, financial and environmental public policy arenas for strategic planning.  Develop and implement long-term advocacy strategies to create commercial advantage.  Assess corporate regulatory risks and advise on regulatory risk disclosures and valuation.  Establish businesses as thought-leaders that drive policy development.  Diverse functional experience includes:

• Led NGSA’s twelve-member board of directors through a strategic planning initiative for a $3 million restructuring of the association’s mission, goals, and objectives.
• Advised corporate financial reporting on regulatory risk disclosures.
• Developed strategy and manage day-to-day legislative and regulatory advocacy for the association’s three-year Dodd-Frank financial reform initiative on Capitol Hill and within the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
• Worked with the corporate compliance officer to develop and implement a standards of conduct compliance program for the utility and its federally-regulated affiliate.
• Represented utility in industry negotiations that established federal regulatory standards for counterparty creditworthiness through the North American Energy Standards Board.
• Led five-person professional federal and state advocacy team for a natural gas utility with $1.2 billion in operating revenue and more than one million customers in three states.
• Represented utility at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on pipeline supplier contract issues associated with serving a 1.6 Bcf daily natural gas demand.

Describe your key business transactional experience:

• Developed investor report and conducted the investor and rating agency conference calls to explain the market position of Appalachian natural gas production in a forward-sale by a natural gas exploration and production company to back a $250 million, 10-year bond.
• Determined and presented to investors the rationale for the $11 million value in adding fuel oil generation capability to a natural gas-fired power facility in New York City.
• Evaluated industrial development site fuel economics for 2,000 MW of natural gas-fired power generation in the Southeast.
• Evaluated and recommended supply strategy options for a Louisiana utility’s $25 million natural gas procurement plan to the senior management team.
• Recommended and implemented a supplier contract negotiation strategy based on in-depth familiarity with regulatory policy. Achieved a $1.4 million infrastructure improvement with no utility capital costs, carrying costs, or revenue recovery risk.
• Led management team negotiations that restructured approximately $54 million in delivery contracts for 60% of the utility’s pipeline supply agreements.
• Developed fuel cost estimates and procurement strategy for a $10 million supply interconnection to install 500 MW of on-site power generation for an aluminum manufacturing plant.
• Kept senior management, internal stakeholders, and regulators informed to achieve full recovery of $39 million in Chapter 11 bankruptcy settlement costs via utility customer rates in five states.
• Submitted written testimony in federal regulatory proceeding regarding the allocation of costs from contract expirations. Created leverage to negotiate an 18% contract cost decrease worth $1.5 million annually.
• Successfully negotiated during a federal regulatory proceeding to reduce financial exposure to capital abandonment costs by 75%, saving $300,000.

What is the most important skill you bring to a corporate board?
Diverse experience in business and policy allows me to ask the right questions and move a profit-making enterprise forward, even in the midst of uncertainty.

My leadership has produced:

• Alliances between unlikely partners to influence historic national financial reform legislation that saved energy companies billions of dollars in set-asides.
• A reputation for companies as experts that help shape the thinking of policymakers and regulatory agencies on market issues.
• Regulatory interventions that saved utility companies millions of dollars.
• Market analysis and asset valuation to drive energy contracts and capital spending worth tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars per deal.

I move comfortably among corporate, regulatory, and policy environments to build alliances that create a competitive advantage for companies. Senior management relies on my ability to evaluate options and identify a path forward under challenging conditions. I diagnose business needs based on reason, market analysis, and a seasoned intuition that zeroes in on key considerations in the outcome of important decisions.

Specialties include:

• Strong advocacy partnerships
• Regulatory and policy advocacy, analysis, and strategy at the state and federal level
• Senior leadership advisor
• Ability to evaluate, negotiate, and close contract deals
• Result-oriented leadership
• Corporate stewardship
• Market analysis and asset valuation
• Evaluation of business options; decision support
• Oversight of multiple accounts
• Regulatory proceeding interventions
• Compliance planning
• Customer relationships/client collaboration