Pat Wood III

Pat Wood III has spent his career making power systems work better for the people who depend on them — cleaner, more resilient, more competitive, and increasingly in the hands of customers rather than monopolies.

Today, Pat and the HEN team are building that future in real-time in Texas, the world's fastest-transitioning power market, through a growing network of energy storage, peaking generation, and demand-responsive customer assets.

He's been here before. At the turn of the millennium, as Chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Pat helped engineer one of the most consequential regulatory transformations in American energy history — restructuring Texas utilities into what became the most competitive power market on the planet. The results speak for themselves: Texas has gone from the 33rd cheapest state for electricity to the 9th cheapest, while becoming the 6th largest solar, wind, and battery market in the world. Lower prices. More capacity. Fewer emissions. The model works.

Pat then took that same market-building philosophy to Washington as Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he championed natural gas infrastructure, wholesale market formation, and grid reliability at the national scale.

Since leaving public service, he has remained at the frontier — as a director on public company boards (Dynegy, Quanta Services, SunPower, Memorial Resource Development), and as a developer of projects that shaped the energy transition before most people knew it was coming: Airtricity, First Wind, Texas Genco, Sharyland Utilities, Xtreme Power, and TPI Composites.

Today Pat chairs Luma, the joint venture rebuilding Puerto Rico's power grid. He co-chairs the Pew Charitable Trusts Distributed Energy Resource Advisory Council, and serves on the boards of the Rocky Mountain Institute, PowerHouse Texas, the Energy Leadership Institute, and Energy Innovation.

He is a civil engineer from Texas A&M and holds a law degree from Harvard. Most importantly — by his own account — he convinced Kathleen Ryder to marry him thirty years ago. They have four highly engaged sons.