3775 Georgia Street #301
San Diego, CA 92103
(415) 238-0157
energyoverseer@comcast.net
Arthur O'Donnell is an independent energy consultant and electricity market analyst, based in San Diego, California, but with direct experience throughout the Western Interconnected Grid.
In 2022-2024, Arthur served as Director of Policy Administration for the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, building on his two-year term as a US Department of Energy Clean Energy Innovator. His main focus was to help the PRC develop and implement policies to advance Grid Modernization, Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) and integration of renewable energy.
From 2012 - 2020, Arthur worked at the California Public Utilities Commission as a Program & Project Supervisor in Grid Planning & Reliability (in Energy Division), and Risk Assessment & Safety Advisory (for Safety & Enforcement Division). He was a senior advisor to the newly created Wildfire Mitigation Division, evaluating utility wildfire mitigation plans and helping WSD make a transition to the Natural Resources Agency in 2021.
From 2008 - 2010, he was Executive Director of the Center for Resource Solutions, a globally influential environmental non-profit based in San Francisco. CRS created and administers the Green-E (R) certification program for renewable energy and carbon offsets, working with electricity suppliers and utilities all across the US to ensure the validity of energy market transactions. The Green-e (R) symbol is also one of the most recognized and trusted certification logos in the world.
For over 20 years, Arthur covered energy markets and environmental issues for a variety of specialized news services, including E&E's GreenWire and Land Letter, California Current newsletter, Public Utilities Fortnightly, EnergyCentral.com, and McGraw-Hill's Electric Utility Week and other publications.
From 1989 - 2002, he was the founding editor and associate publisher of California Energy Markets, a highly regarded weekly newsletter covering California and the Desert Southwest. Arthur & CEM have received many awards from major journalism organizations, including the National Press Club and the Newsletter & Electronic Publisher's Foundation, particularly for prescient coverage of the Western Energy Crisis in 2000-2001.
Arthur is also a noted urban photographer, and author of the Bound to Fall series of photo essays that is now part of the permanent collection at the San Francisco History Center. In early 2018, the San Francisco Public Library hosted a special exhibit of Bound to Fall photos, and in October 2018, the non-profit group Shaping San Francisco featured Arthur & Bound to Fall via a gallery exhibit, a walking tour of the Civic Center Hub, and a panel presentation on the economic forces that are changing San Francisco's urban landscape.
Arthur's recent photographic projects include: "Albuquerque City Limits" and Edith Boulevard: Road of Many Lives".
Albuquerque's civic footprint offers an incredible variety of images and urban/rural interfaces. Municipal boundaries are jagged and interspersed with rural holdouts from attempts at annexation. Odd pockets of the city follow tortured shoestring lines that stretch along major corridors. Here strip malls give way to farm land; cookie-cutter housing developments sit side-by-side with unique open spaces. And at the far western edge of the city limits, main roads end abruptly or seem to go on forever.
Take a journey around the edges of a unique Southwestern city.
Contact me (use button above) to be kept up to date!
Multicultural Legacies
Descendants of the Anasazi tribes settled here thousands of years ago, establishing a culture that remains in local pueblos and has influenced both the Spanish conquerors and later Anglo inhabitants.
A City Like No Other
Albuquerque's profile is made up
of at least two hundred inflection points, few of which are 90-degree corners.
of at least two hundred inflection points, few of which are 90-degree corners.
There are ragged edges and sharp points, curves and lines that follow river banks, arroyos and irrigation ditches, large building blocks of mostly-undeveloped land, and what appear to be multiple islands off the coast but are parcels tethered by "shoestring" annexation politics.