Former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff is best known as a champion of the demand side, from shepherding through the landmark Order 745 to his prior work for consumers and his subsequent jobs working on demand response.

“Everything in my life that I have done and tried to promote and advocate always comes back to — how do you best help consumers, ultimately,” Wellinghoff said in an interview. “I mean, the whole focus needs to be on the consumer. If you don’t think back from the consumer perspective, you know, it’s not about the utilities, it’s not about Voltus, it’s not about the generator, it’s not about any of those things. It’s about the guy, or the woman, who pays the bill.”

Since leaving FERC, Wellinghoff had a stint at Tesla when it focused on the energy transition. He’s been involved with Voltus since 2017 (first on the board, later as an executive), which seeks to pay consumers for leveraging their distributed energy resources to provide services to the grid.

His focus on consumers goes back to his education, where he got a master’s degree in mathematics from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and briefly taught at an inner-city school there.

“I quickly determined that teaching school is the hardest job in the world, and so I went to law school to become a lawyer,” Wellinghoff said.

He enrolled in the Antioch School of Law, which was in Washington despite being tied to Antioch College in Ohio. He was part of the first graduating class at the law school, which no longer exists, alongside legendary athlete Jim Thorpe’s daughter Grace Thorpe and “quite a few interesting folks.”

His early legal career was in line with his alma mater’s focus on consumers, as he became a staffer for a commissioner on the Nevada PUC. His stint there overlapped with the Arab Oil Embargo in a state where oil was a major source of electric generation.

“So, as a result, in the 18 to 24 months I was with the commission, we saw more utility rate cases being filed than that commission had seen in the previous 10 years,” Wellinghoff said. “So, in like a two-year period, I got this compressed experience with utilities and how they did utility rate cases and their impact on consumers.”

After that experience, he went to work at the District Attorney’s Office in Washoe County in Reno, Nev., where Wellinghoff represented consumers in utility rate cases.

“That was the first time that was ever done in Nevada, and probably in any state, by a state district attorney’s office where they actually represented consumers before the commission, and I then translated that into a statewide office where I actually helped draft some legislation that created a consumer advocate’s office in Nevada,” Wellinghoff said.

He effectively wrote the legislation that led to his next job as state consumer advocate in Nevada, where he continued advocating for consumers, arguing utilities had to control their costs.

“It was a battle, and it continues to be a battle, because the utilities are not financially incentivized to do that,” Wellinghoff said. “And I often did find that there were third parties like solar firms and energy efficiency providers and HVAC providers and others that you were more attuned to working with consumers to try to control consumers’ costs because they had some financial interest in doing that.”

He was one of the early consumer advocates, though around 10 other states had a version of that office when he started the job in 1981, and he kept working there until 1989.

In the 1990s he entered private practice, working on lengthy litigation stemming from a massive industrial accident when the PEPCON rocket-fuel plant in Henderson, Nev., exploded. It was equivalent to a one-megaton detonation, and it caused $100 million in damage in the Las Vegas area.

Working on that case, Wellinghoff did 150 depositions and learned about mass-tort litigation, which would serve him well when he returned to energy law full-time in 1998 to become the general counsel at the Nevada PUC.

“I was sort of in the middle of the Enron debacle, and we were actually drafting legislation in Nevada during Enron to restructure state of Nevada to make it competitive — to allow entities like Enron, as a retail provider, to provide retail energy services to consumers throughout Nevada,” Wellinghoff said. “We did that up until the crisis happened in California, where the whole wholesale market flew apart.”

Enron’s manipulations and the California energy crisis killed similar legislation in other states, and it made Wellinghoff turn back to his skills deposing witnesses who were involved in the crisis, which involved bad actors from many other firms. He did that from outside the PUC, where in private practice, he represented the MGM Resorts in Las Vegas, which included casinos like the Bellagio and had an aggregate power demand of 300 MW.

The utility for Las Vegas asked for $922 million to pay for inflated wholesale power prices at the time — a sum greater than every previous rate request it had ever filed, Wellinghoff said.

“I started taking depositions,” “And I took about 20 depositions of utility executives and of expert witnesses that the utility had hired or had as consultants, and they had one consultant who was charged with developing a software program to assess the risk of their trading program to trade energy in the wholesale market during the Enron debacle,” Wellinghoff said. “And I asked him if he ever assessed what the level of risk was to be short.”

The answer was no — the program kept crashing when trying to calculate the risk. The utility was unhedged and exposed to prices that were two to three times the norm. In a deposition, the consultant admitted “the risk of going short was very, very, very, very large,” Wellinghoff said.

The depositions were part of the evidence the PUC used to slash the request down to some $400 million, and the utility went bankrupt — its shareholders eating the risk it had tried to foist on consumers.

After that experience, President George W. Bush nominated Wellinghoff to FERC, where he served for seven years, five as chair after President Barack Obama elevated him.

“I’m still the longest serving chairman at FERC, which is kind of amazing to me, since this year is 20 years since I went into FERC,” Wellinghoff said.

While there have been other commissioners with long stints on the regulator in recent history, Wellinghoff said the job involves public service with little pay. He had 11 staffers reporting to him who made more money as long-tenured government workers. That pay issue is why most stop at one five-year term at best.

Before joining FERC, the only experience Wellinghoff had with markets was the “Enron debacle,” but there he learned about other wholesale markets like in ISO-NE, where at the time efficiency could be bid into the market, and demand response.

“I saw that there was room for creativity,” Wellinghoff said. “And I also truly believe that whatever could help consumers we should try to do. Whatever can provide consumers with ways to control their costs and be more efficient and get energy services, more reliably and more effectively. And I realized that markets are probably the way to do that.”

During his time as chair, Wellinghoff was able to move that ball forward with Order 745, which required demand response programs in the energy market to pay consumers the same as generators. That case was appealed by opponents and eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the order in the EPSA v. FERC decision.

“That was, I think, the most important case that has ever been decided on a FERC opinion,” he said. “And I believe that that was also one of the most important cases in energy for consumers, because it was a clear victory for consumers that gave FERC the authority to oversee consumers’ participation in wholesale markets and provided consumers with that opportunity to participate at a fair level of compensation.”

Wellinghoff’s keynote address “Grid Innovation at the Intersection of Policy and Markets” will be delivered Feb. 25 at Yes Energy’s EMPOWER 2026 conference in Boulder, Colo. To learn more about EMPOWER visit yesenergy.com.