They’ve Got Next: Energy Fresh Face Karen Bruni

Karen Bruni remembers when the first windmills sprouted in a field close to her village near Celle, Germany, where she rode horses as a middle school student.

They caused a fair amount of angst among residents, she recalled, in how the turbines changed the farmland and generated background noise. Her father, who was in local politics, was generally receptive to the windmills despite growing up in a coal mining family; in addition, he harbored concerns about the safety of nuclear energy after the Chernobyl disaster.

“Energy policy was just always part of our dinner table conversation,” Bruni said.

Today, Bruni, a 33-year-old associate for Steptoe & Johnson LLP’s Washington office, finds herself working in the esoteric trenches of electricity law to help some of the biggest U.S. utilities navigate a changing power grid and rising clean energy goals.

Like the incursion of windmills near her home, the energy transition can be complicated, requiring a deeper understanding of policy, she said.

“I don’t feel like I’m just reading cases all day long, but I’m reading expert reports, trying to understand how these markets really work,” Bruni said. “We need to understand the technical intricacies of the energy markets in order to translate what the experts are finding into compelling legal arguments.”

She has tackled a wide range of energy cases in recent years. She represented Public Service Enterprise Group when, last year, it sold its fleet of 13 fossil-fuel plants for about $1.9 billion to ArcLight Capital Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, a move by the New Jersey-based company to focus on its nuclear plants and offshore wind farms.

She is defending Duke Energy against a competitor in the wholesale power market in a case pending before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.

She helped American Electric Power Co. in a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission case involving rules governing the role of large-scale batteries—which are key to scaling up renewables—as they plug into the energy system. And she represented transmission owners and AEP in the country’s largest organized power market to advocate for rate incentives that keep revenues flowing to transmission projects.

The cases, Bruni said, tap into an overarching theme of her work: making new technologies work with, at times, an obsolete rule book. Also, the underlying legal issues have become even more crucial in recent years as the aging power grid confronts a changing generation mix, she said.

As more wind and solar farms are built, transmission lines must be built to connect them to consumers. The renewables, which run when the wind blows and the sun shines, then must compete on a level playing field with fossil fuel generation, a source of power that can run all the time, raising legal and regulatory questions about fair market rules, she said.

“We’re working with a regulatory framework that was written for a very different energy system,” Bruni said. “We’re trying to, as lawyers, figure out how to make that work for our clients.”

Bruni’s upbringing and drive to understand the entire energy system is evident in her creative arguments in a variety of cases, said Dan Mullen, a partner and co-chair of Steptoe’s energy practice group.

“She’s so versatile—she’s just as comfortable in sort of weedy regulatory issues as she is in litigation,” Mullen said. “She can pivot just as easily from electricity to gas to oil to renewables to financial trading at the drop of a hat. That makes her such a valuable member of the team.”

After Bruni moved to the U.S. when she was 18, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University in Washington.

While in undergrad, she worked for the German Marshall Fund, where she found she was a “natural fit” for the think tank’s energy transition efforts. She worked to organize forums that brought together senior officials from FERC, Capitol Hill and policy-makers to discuss how transatlantic energy policy could be updated for the 21st-century energy system and ensure communities aren’t left behind.

She then earned a law degree from Harvard University in 2016. She worked for a summer during law school at the Brattle Group, where she studied utility law issues and market manipulation following the infamous collapse of Enron Corp. The organization’s high regard for Steptoe connected her to the firm, she said.

“It was a good summer not just for my substantive work but because it really exposed me to a lot of the experts and lawyers who work on these issues,” Bruni said. “I didn’t want to be a policy wonk, but I still wanted to do something that was government- and policy-facing.”

Bruni had a “wake-up call” just after joining Steptoe, she said, when she was thrust into a FERC investigation concerning energy offers and trading in PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that oversees the wholesale power market through 13 eastern states and Washington, D.C.

She entered a world of energy market dynamics and competition—very different from the one she expected to find as a lawyer working on lawsuits and heading into courthouses.

“I did not appreciate how much of the technical side of these markets we need to understand,” she said. “But now, looking back, that’s one of the things I really enjoy about my work.”