Insights

Washington – May 4, 2023: Washingtonian has named Ambassador Robert Holleyman and Tyler O’Connor to its annual edition of the 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy in Washington D.C. The list highlights “smart, innovative Washingtonians who care about issues and spend a lot of time thinking about them.”

Washington – February 17, 2023: Chambers and Partners has ranked eight Crowell & Moring practice groups and 15 individual lawyers in the Chambers Global 2023 guide. The rankings are driven by independent interviews of clients and members of the legal community.

Washington, D.C. – July 12, 2022: Lisa Henneberry joins Crowell & Moring as a partner in its Energy practice, bringing more than three decades of experience helping clients navigate and mitigate risk in the global energy sector. Her practice focuses on the development, construction, and operation of conventional and alternative energy projects, including power generation, fuels, and related feedstock, capacity, and offtake arrangements, as well as major industrial development.

The global energy crisis together with the ongoing energy transition received top billing for 2022 and, from an international disputes perspective, will continue to dominate in both the short and medium term. In particular, disputes arising from price volatility of raw materials and energy are expected to be the leading cause of disputes, followed by the construction of energy infrastructure (which was the leading cause of disputes in the last five years). International arbitration remains the clear choice for the resolution of energy disputes.

If past is prologue, then energy companies may again find themselves targets of congressional investigations. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has outlined plans to investigate the Biden Administration’s climate change policies and the clean energy and transportation companies that receive government money under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) and the Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”). This is a replay of when the GOP took control of the House in 2010 and congressional committees investigated implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, focusing in part on exposing what they believed to be spending abuses by the Department of Energy’s (“DOE”) Loan Programs Office. Most famously, congressional Republicans targeted Solyndra, a California-based solar panel manufacturer that eventually went bankrupt after receiving the first loan guarantee issued by DOE under Title 17 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

This has not been a joyful winter for energy industry executives. They have repeatedly awoken to alerts that substations in the Northwest and Southeast have been physically attacked and that a major engineering firm was the subject of a ransomware cyberattack that may have compromised utility data.