PEOPLE : Bay Area Lawyer Is Energetic in Efforts to Conserve Energy

SAN FRANCISCO —  It takes a bundle of energy to get people to use less energy.

Just ask Ralph Cavanagh, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney in San Francisco who for the last dozen years has been a tireless, articulate advocate of wise energy production and use in California and the Pacific Northwest.

Exuberant, intense and good-humored, Cavanagh (pronounced Ca-VAN-uh) at 38 has emerged as a nationally recognized prime mover behind a resurgence of conservation and efficiency programs as a way for utilities to avoid building new power plants and to cut down on the burning of fossil fuels.

Two years ago, he was instrumental in assembling a coalition of California utility executives, environmentalists and others who negotiated a far-reaching, $560-million plan that rewards utilities for promoting energy savings by customers. The behind-the-scenes effort won quick support from the California Public Utilities Commission.

“There’s no question that the collaborative process wouldn’t have started or succeeded to the degree it did without Ralph,” said John C. Fox, manager of energy efficiency services for Pacific Gas & Electric, which participated in the so-called California Collaborative and in January launched a $2-billion energy efficiency program that Cavanagh helped devise.

Cavanagh’s role in the process, Fox added, was as “the conscience of it and the guy who was always orchestrating compromises to get around problems. Ralph would say, ‘Where’s the middle ground?’ ”

Ironically, Fox noted, the only case that the litigation-minded NRDC has ever won in the U.S. Supreme Court was against PG&E; in 1982. Cavanagh and a team of lawyers for California successfully defended a state law banning additional nuclear power plants until the problem of disposing of spent radioactive fuel was solved.

Looking back, Cavanagh said matter-of-factly: “We never got saddled with the costs of an abandoned nuclear plant,” an allusion to the many cancellations of partly finished plants that saddled taxpayers with billions of dollars of payments in Washington state and elsewhere.

Cavanagh--who could pass for an earnest student with his longish strawberry-blond hair, freckles and wire-rim glasses--grew up in New Hampshire, where his father, an Audubon Society member, instilled in him a fierce appreciation for the environment.

Cavanagh received undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University, where his bid to be elected president of the debate association was upset by another student named Deborah Rhode. Rhode, whom Cavanagh later married, is now an assistant professor of law at Stanford.

After a brief stint with the Justice Department, Cavanagh joined the NRDC in 1979. His first task was to help persuade Washington state utilities and regulators to replace five Washington Public Power Supply System nuclear plants with energy-saving programs and renewable resources.

As the NRDC’s energy program director, Cavanagh operates from a cramped, chaotic office south of Market Street, where piles of books, letters, brochures and legal documents spill from cluttered shelves onto the floor.

The walls are lined with plaques, including the federal Bonneville Power Administration’s Award for Exceptional Public Service, granted in 1986. The award recognized, among other projects, Cavanagh’s spearheading of a two-year, $20-million effort in Hood River County, Ore., where 85% of the households agreed to let utilities install energy-saving measures.

Another of Cavanagh’s pet projects is drumming up support in Sacramento and Washington for increased fuel efficiency for autos.

Cavanagh said he sees two key problems with the national energy strategy unveiled in February: It doesn’t go far enough in removing existing barriers to energy efficiency and renewable resources, and it would treat as taxable income utilities’ payments and rebates to customers who take steps to save energy.

Although Cavanagh knows that he could be making much more money elsewhere than in public interest law, he noted emphatically: “I would never go into corporate law.” Rather, he said, he expects eventually to become a public utilities commissioner or a teacher.

With more than a hint of seriousness, he added: “I’ve often threatened to become Bonneville’s administrator.”