Bullish Despite Federal Headwinds

Seth Hilton
Partner, Energy Development

Seth Hilton discusses why California’s energy market fundamentals, including load growth, reliability needs, and state policy advantages, create significant opportunities for renewable development despite federal policy challenges. He remains optimistic about the state’s energy transition trajectory.

Transcript

Seth Hilton, I'm a partner in our energy development group located in San Francisco. I also co-lead our energy industry group.

In the energy space and especially in California, we are not surprisingly dealing with the tension between state energy policy and where federal energy policy is going and trying to move forward despite some strong headwinds.

Despite those challenges, I think the fundamentals show that there are still real opportunities certainly in California, which I track, and elsewhere. I think in large part the reason why there continue to be significant opportunities here is because if you look at the fundamentals meaning where load growth is going and what we need to develop in terms of reliability there is going to have to be ongoing procurement of generation and storage. Otherwise, we're going to run into significant reliability concerns and there's also affordability concerns that we're potentially going to run into. So given those kind of market fundamentals, I'm actually fairly bullish on where we're going despite some of the federal headwinds. So, I think in terms of opportunities, certainly state policy has become more and more important, especially given where we're going with federal policy. For myself practicing in California, certainly the state's view of where we should go in terms of the energy transition in terms of dealing with the that the challenges of climate change do create opportunities here that you may not see in other states. So, there are potentially opportunities here in California as a result of that state policy despite the federal headwinds.