EEI Head Kuhn Gets Unique, Sentimental Send-Off

Here is the backstory to the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Austin this month: After 30 years President and CEO Thomas Kuhn, universally known as Tom, is retiring.

That flavored the gathering with a touch of bitter sweetness —uncertainty about who would succeed Kuhn. Would the EEI change? Would Kuhn’s easy-going accessibility be replaced with a more rigid ethos?

The Edison Electric Institute speaks for the 168 investor-owned electric utilities which provide power to 72 percent of America.

As the head of EEI, Kuhn has been its chief lobbyist, the man who has taken their message – and campaign contributions — to Congress on everything from environmental legislation to protecting the dividends, which utilities are famous for under the rubric of widow-and-orphan stock.

If a male Washington lobbyist conjures up for you an image of a super-smooth talker in a Saville Row suit, a made-to-measure shirt, a Rolex peeking out from under the French cuff, and a silk square hanging dramatically out of the breast pocket, that hasn’t been Kuhn.

Instead, you might mistake Kuhn in the halls of Congress for someone who hadn’t come to change hearts and minds, but who was there to change the copying machines.

Also, if you think lobbyists slap backs, grab both your hands when you first meet them, and seek to ingratiate at every turn, Kuhn hasn’t been that either.

In fact, Kuhn has always seemed keen to know how things worked; an outsider looking in, not the consummate insider moving the action.

But he has been the insider, and until year’s end, the insider where energy policy is concerned — a man of many connections with a boyishness that belies his responsibilities and has defied the passing of years.

In my knowledge, Kuhn is genuinely liked by legislators of both parties. Some have become close personal friends, like J. Bennett Johnston, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, and a former chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Kuhn is ecumenical about friends and politicians. At Yale, he was a classmate of George W. Bush, but he also has had good relations with Democratic presidents.

The fact that most investor-owned utilities favor Republicans over Democrats hasn’t touched Kuhn’s ability to move in his disarming way across the aisle and back. He is too skilled to have thrust his own political views forward.

Kuhn has a special skill which I observed from before he took the job at EEI, when he was president of the American Nuclear Energy Council: He listens to his opponents into submission.

His listening keenly leads them to believe that they have won when they have lost the argument. It leaves them feeling gently vanquished.

This year’s conference was a great sendoff for Kuhn. At more than 1,000 registrants, it was the largest in recent years. The glamor from the podium was 24 carats: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and presidential clean energy advisor John Podesta. What is the collective noun for energy and electricity headliners? Perhaps a wattage?

Washington has shaped Kuhn, and he has shaped it where electric utilities are concerned. It was even present during his time as a naval officer; part of that service was as liaison to the White House.

Kuhn’s lasting contribution has been how he persuaded sometimes reluctant electric utility executives to back carbon reduction.

Clint Vince, chairman of the U.S. energy practice and co-chairman of the global energy practice at Denton’s, the world’s largest law firm, told me, “Tom Kuhn is a giant leader who helped guide the electric industry into voluntary decarbonization and scores of other beneficial things.”

Vince said Kuhn did this with both a “hefty chunk of wisdom” and a “trademark grin.” He added, “He is as faithful a friend as one could have.”

As a father, he and his wife Wendy have raised four strapping (I use the word advisedly) children, two boys and two girls — a gender balance like his political balance.