Who is KEARNS & WEST?

Kearns and West is the company that claims to have impartially represented tribal interests, fishermen and the public in the MLPA “Initiative” process.  They were the hired guns – paid for with private funds – who managed and facilitated the “process” –  including the interviewing and choosing of “stakeholders” – who supposedly represented public interests.

And, as it turns out, Kearns and West is up to its eyeballs with conflicts of interest, representing high powered corporate energy interests.  Their list of clients reads like a who’s who of electricity and natural gas providers.  Is there any doubt – that questions of why the MLPAI did not protect the ocean from industrialization and energy development – were deliberately not allowed anywhere, at anytime, in the so-called “process”?  Kearns and West is involved with conflicts of interest – of criminal magnitude.

The following is a list of companies that Kearns and West lists as clients (from their website)

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COMPANIES Represented by KEARNS & WEST:

AmerenUE

Avaya Government Solutions (formerly Nortel Government Solutions)

Booz Allen Hamilton

CDM

CH2M HILL

Columbia Gas Transmission Corporation

Dominion Resources Services, Inc.

Duke Energy

Entergy Corporation

Horizon Wind Energy, LLC

ICF

Idaho Power Company

MWH

PacifiCorp

Pacific Gas & Electric Company

Portland General Electric Corporation

PPL

Robbins-Gioia

Southern California Edison

Trans-Elect Development Company

URS

Verdant Power

 

 

 

 

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The following is a brief rundown on each of these companies that Kearns and West represents:

Ameren  - Ameren is a Giant Electric and Natural Gas energy outfit – 2.4 million electric, 1 million gas customers in illinois and Missouri 64,000 square miles.  It is a holding company for several power and energy companies.

Avaya Government Solutions  – This company specializes in “secure web-enabling government solutions for clients in homeland security, criminal justice and intelligence, defense and civilian agencies within the federal government and at state and local levels.”

Booz Allen Hamilton  – defense and homeland security

CDM  – CDM is a huge Water, Environment, Transportation, and Energy development contractor.

CH2M HILL  – CH2M HILL offers “full-service capabilities in multiple business units, among three key operating divisions, Facilities and Infrastructure; Energy; and Government, Environment, and Nuclear.”

This company provided the primary consultation services to P.G.&E. when they were propsing to install wave energy “farms” on the North Coast.

Columbia Gas Transmission Corporation  – “Columbia Gas Transmission knows how to get it in gear when it comes to natural gas delivery.”  The company, a subsidiary of NiSource, operates a 12,000-mile long natural gas pipeline network. Columbia Gas Transmission moves, on average, about 3 billion cu. ft. of natural gas per day to customers (72 local distribution companies and several hundred gas end-users in 10 Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern US states). The company has 600 billion cu. ft. of natural gas storage capacity, including 37 underground storage fields in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Dominion Resources Inc.  – Dominion Resources Inc. is a power and energy company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia that supplies electricity in parts of Virginia and North Carolina and supplies natural gas to parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and eastern North Carolina. Dominion also has generation facilities in Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Duke Energy  – Duke Energy is “The biggest nuclear power company in America.” They are also into coal, natural gas and oil.   4 million customers

Entergy  – Entergy Corporation is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations.   It is headquartered in the Central Business District of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Horizon Wind Energy  – Horizon Wind Energy is a wind energy developer and independent power producer, based in Houston, Texas. Horizon has developed wind farms in New York, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Washington, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Indiana and Illinois. Originally Zilkha Renewable Energy, Horizon was purchased by investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2005 for an undisclosed sum, and was acquired by Energias de Portugal in 2007 for $2.15 billion.

ICF International  – ICF International, formerly known as ICF Consulting, is a management, technology, and policy consulting firm based in Fairfax, Virginia. ICF International partners with government and commercial clients to deliver professional services and technology solutions in the energy, environment, and transportation; health, education, and social programs; and homeland security and defense markets.  ICF employs more than 3,700 employees.

Idaho Power Company  – Idaho Power Company (IPC) is a regulated electrical power utility. Its business involves the purchase, sale, generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho. It is a subsidiary of IDACORP, Inc. The company’s 24,000-square-mile (62,000 km2) service area generally follows the area around the Snake River and its tributaries.

Idaho Power owns and operates 17 hydroelectric dams and 2 natural gas power plants. IPC also owns shares of three coal-fired power plants.

MWH  – MWH specializes in all aspects of wet infrastructure including water and wastewater networks; hydropower and renewable energy; ports and waterways; environmental services, and industrial sustainability.

PacifiCorp  – PacifiCorp is an electric power company in the northwestern United States.   Pacific Power and Rocky Mountain Power combined serve over 1.4 million residential customers, 202,000 commercial customers, and 34,000 industrial and irrigation customers – for a total of approximately 1,668,000 customers. The service area is 136,000 square miles (350,000 km2). Pacific Power and Rocky Mountain Power own and maintain 15,622 miles (25,141 km) of long distance transmission lines, 43,850 miles (70,570 km) of overhead distribution lines, 14,510 miles (23,350 km) of underground distribution lines, and 900 substations.

In 1977, PacifiCorp spun off its coal mining interests into a mining company known as NERCO, which was eventually listed on the New York Stock Exchange and ranked as high as 353 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest American companies. Through its majority interest in NERCO, PacifiCorp was involved in the mining of coal, oil, natural gas, gold, silver, and uranium. PacifiCorp still owned 82% of NERCO in 1993, when it was acquired by the mining giant, the Rio Tinto Group.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company  – P.G.&E. is the utility that provides natural gas and electricity to most of the northern two-thirds of California, from Bakersfield almost to the Oregon border. It is a subsidiary of the PG&E Corporation.

PPL  – PPL, formerly known as PP&L or Pennsylvania Power and Light is an energy company headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA. It currently controls about 19,000 megawatts (MW) of electrical generating capacity in the United States, primarily in Pennsylvania and Montana, and delivers electricity to 1.4 million customers in Pennsylvania, nearly a million in Kentucky, and 2.6 million in Great Britain. It also provides natural gas delivery service to 321,000 customers in Kentucky.

The majority of PPL’s power plants burn coal, oil, or natural gas. PPL also owns peaking plants, which require few operators and have a high profit margin due to their ability to rapidly come online when the price of electricity spikes. PPL’s largest plant is the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a 2,352 MW nuclear power plant, located on the Susquehanna River seven miles (11 km) northeast of Berwick, Pennsylvania.

Robbins-Gioia  – “BALANCED SOLUTIONS FOR BETTER RESULTS”   Robbins-Gioia is a consulting firm that “solves problems and saves projects through the balanced use of people, processes, and tools for the most optimal solutions.”

Southern California Edison  – Southern California Edison (or SCE Corp), the largest subsidiary of Edison International, is the primary electricity supply company for much of Southern California.  It provides 11 million people with electricity.

Trans-Elect Development Company  – The Company is comprised of experienced utility, finance, regulatory, legal and management veterans that accumulated ownership of and managed more than 12,600 miles of transmission assets either through acquisitions or building new transmission.

URS  – URS Corporation is an engineering design firm and a U.S. federal government contractor. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, URS is a full-service, global organization with offices located in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.   As of Sept. 2010, the firm had approximately 46,500 employees worldwide, in more than 40 countries

“The global demand for energy is at an all-time high. To meet this need, URS designs, constructs and maintains virtually every type of power plant and provides single-source management services for greenfield, retrofit and expansion projects across the entire power-generation industry.”  They also design build and maintain all kinds of huge industrial scale infrastructure.

Verdant Power  – Verdant Power is a maker and installer of tidal power and hydroelectric systems. Their primary device is an underwater turbine, similar to a three-bladed wind turbine, that is designed to capture energy from tidal currents and (precipitation-driven) river currents. The company uses the trade term “kinetic hydropower” to distinguish their systems from those (tidal and hydroelectric) based on dam construction. The company’s first project, the “RITE Project”, is several turbines in New York City’s East River.

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I will leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about the possible conflicts of interest inherent in allowing a company like Kearns and West facilitate the shut- down of access to seafood gathering for the people of Northern California, without publicly called for safeguards against industrialization within the so-called “marine protected areas.”

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