Forum Contributors

Rob Gramlich is Founder and President of Grid Strategies LLC where he provides economic policy analysis for clients on electric transmission and power markets in pursuit of low-cost de-carbonization.  He is co-founder of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, the WATT Coalition, and the Future Power Markets Forum. Rob oversaw transmission and power market policy for the American Wind Energy Association from 2005 through 2016 as Senior Vice President for Government and Public Affairs, Interim CEO, and Policy Director. He was Economic Advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood III from 2001 to 2005, Senior Economist at PJM Interconnection in 1999 and 2000, Senior Associate at PG&E National Energy Group in 2000-2001, and an analyst at the FERC Office of Economic Policy, ICF Resources, the World Resources Institute, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1990s. He testifies frequently before the US Congress, US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), US Department of Energy, and state legislatures and regulatory commissions.  He has served on advisory committees for the U.S. Department of Energy and the North American Energy Standards Board, on boards of a number of regional clean energy organizations. Rob has a Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree from UC Berkeley and a BA with Honors in Economics from Colby College.

Benjamin Hobbs is the Theodore and Kay Schad Professor of Environmental Management with the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Baltimore, MD, USA, and the Founding Director of the JHU Environment, Energy, Sustainability & Health Institute. Dr. Hobbs is the Associate Director, Yale-JHU SEARCH (Solutions for Energy, Air, Climate, and Health) Center. He chairs the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator, joining the committee in 2002 after several years as a consultant to FERC’s Office of the Economic Advisor. Dr. Hobbs is on the editorial boards of several journals, such as Energy Economics. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institute for Operations Research & Management Science (INFORMS). Dr. Hobbs received his BS degree from South Dakota State University, a master’s degree in resources management and policy from SUNY-Syracuse, and a PhD in environmental systems engineering from Cornell University. He was a researcher at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and then joined the faculties of systems and civil engineering at Case Western Reserve University prior to moving to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Hobbs has had visiting appointments at many universities and research labs, including being an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Abe Silverman is an assistant research scholar with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) focusing on bringing academics, business leaders, and state and federal regulators together to solve the most pressing barriers to the clean energy transition. He joined Hopkins in July 2024.

Silverman is a lawyer licensed to practice law in Maryland and Washington D.C. and received his Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School in 2001. Before coming to Hopkins, Silverman served as the managing director of non-technical barriers to the clean energy transition at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, starting in April 2023.

Prior to his work at Columbia University, he was general counsel and executive policy counsel for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities from May 2019 to April 2023. Prior to going into state service, Silverman was an executive at NRG Energy, Inc., leading the company’s state and federal markets policy work. Silverman also served at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Silverman facilitates the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission (States Collaborative), which is made up of representatives from ten states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont—that have come together to coordinate on transmission grid expansion efforts in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Silverman received a Bachelor of Science in environmental geology and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Maryland in 1998.

Richard Doying is a senior executive with expertise and in-depth knowledge of multiple areas of the electric sector, including Regional Transmission Organizations, energy market design and operation, power system operations, Federal and State regulation, and strategy development and planning. Richard held several positions at MISO leading design, implementation and operations of MISO markets and reliability functions. Most recently, he served as MISO Executive Vice President of Market and Grid Strategies, where he led the evaluation of emerging industry trends and the creation of a strategic roadmap to enhance MISO’s markets and reliability operations to facilitate power sector de-carbonization. Prior to joining MISO, he was Director of Strategy and New Initiatives at PG&E National Energy Group (1997-2002), and a Project Manager at ICF Resources (1993-1997). He has been a member and chairman of the Board of Directors of the NERC Midwest Reliability Organization, and an advisory board member for the Indiana University, Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy. Richard has a Master of Public Policy degree from The University of Minnesota, and a BA in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

David R. Hill was a founder of the Future Power Markets Forum and currently serves as the Executive Vice President – Energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, and as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New York Independent System Operator. Previously, he was Executive Vice President & General Counsel of NRG Energy, Inc. and General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Energy. He also was an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and a partner and co-head of the energy practice at Sidley Austin LLP. Mr. Hill holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the University of Missouri and his law degree from the Northwestern University School of Law.