With a life grounded in the military ”” an Air Force “brat” and officer with the U.S. Army”™s armored cavalry ”” Karl R. Rábago knows about tactical solutions.
“The cavalry does a whole lot of missions, sometimes with the tip of the spear, sometimes with the flank, sometimes with the rear guard,” Rábago said. “They have a lot of different missions that are dependent on the sort of the needs in the battlefield ”” that mentality seems to work with me.”
As executive director of The Pace Energy and Climate Center in White Plains, Rabago is continuing to lead the charge in getting U.S. utilities to adapt energy efficient measures.
Since leaving the Army, Rábago has had a remarkable career in energy, in which he has garnered a high-ranking title in almost every sector of the industry. As the public utility commissioner for Texas, a businessman in wind farm development and deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy, to name a few, Rábago has sought to find the fertile ground for change that he calls “the margins.”
“The places where land and water meet” are the margins, he said, explaining the metaphor. “The Hudson River is where salt and fresh meet, that”™s where fish want to lay their eggs because that”™s where all the nutrients are. That”™s where all the exciting stuff is,” he said.
But pursuing a career in chasing down the activity at the environmental margins ”” like deregulating utility providers and helping to make the case for environmental protection law ”” came about by happenstance.
Rábago”™s journey began when he was accepted into an Army program that paid for officers to study to be lawyers. International law is what Rábago said he first requested as a specialty, but a higher-ranked officer took the spot and he was told to pursue environmental law.
While teaching cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the latter years of his 13 years in the Army, Rábago pursued his masters of environmental law at Pace. As part of the final leg of earning that degree, Rábago was introduced to two people and two subjects that would help shape the rest of his career.
“The last course I needed that I did not want to take was electric utility regulatory reform being offered by Dick Ottinger,” he said about the class once taught by Pace”™s Energy and Climate Center founder Richard L. Ottinger, dean emeritus whose office is two doors down from Rábago.
What he thought was going to be a boring seminar turned out to reveal “one of the big, hot topics” at the time, he said, which was “electric utilities do not have to account for their environmental damage in the cost of their product.”
Meanwhile, Rábago had also begun doing research credits for the environmental group Riverkeeper and was assigned to work with the group”™s lawyer, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who Rábago said assigned him a project.
“He said, ”˜Count fish.”™”
Rábago”™s research with Riverkeeper involved studying cooling-water intake structures for power plants that take in water along with fish in the process.
So he started counting and said it was the water towers killing the fish.
Rábago then helped write a lawsuit, which spent 18 years going through the court system helped pave the way for the Environmental Protection Agency to have greater regulatory control over the rules with cooling water intake structures.
These final requirements for his degree were pivotal steppingstones in a career that has helped transform the ways in which the environment and electricity intersect.
“The electric utility industry is the largest, the most capital-intensive and the most polluting industry on the face of the Earth,” he said, adding that changing the nature of the industry has taken patience and perseverance.
“They say turning an aircraft carrier, you can”™t do it quickly, and it”™s not very easy, either.”
As the lawsuit slowly made its way through the courts, Rábago decided to return to Texas to teach at the University of Houston Law Center.
Texas is what Rábago called the “family home.” Growing up a military brat, Rábago”™s father, who was of Mexican origin and grew up in Del Rio, Texas, was in the U.S. Air Force and married a German woman. Rábago, one of six children, was born in Germany and loved growing up in a family constantly on the move.
He continued the lifestyle with his own family, a wife who he”™s now been married to for 36 years and three children.
At 34, Rábago was appointed by the state of Texas as its public utilities commissioner where he helped regulate $20 billion in electric and utilities under Gov. Ann W. Richards. He helped usher in the state”™s first wind farm, and Texas now leads the nation in wind energy with more than 12,000 megawatts of wind-generated power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
His push for energy efficiency earned him a spot in the federal government as the deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Energy Department, where he managed the country”™s programs in renewable energy technology.
From there, Rábago picked up jobs throughout the nonprofit and private sectors including roles as the energy program manager for Environmental Defense Fund and with a company that made plastic out of corn.
“I was about to kind of retire in Denver,” he said. “And then it turns out Pace needed an executive director. And it turns out I had a chance to close the circle.”
Rábago has been at Pace for more than a year and has found that his work now at the margins is in the next generation.
“He could have made a lot more money staying out in Colorado, but he”™s here because he loves what he does and he thinks it”™s important,” Ottinger said. “We”™re here to train the next generation so they can save the world and change it.”
With more than 30 years of helping to transform the energy sector, Rábago is passing on the baton from the place he started.
It”™s the young people, he said, who see “there is a transformation in the utility industry driven by technology, driven by third parties, driven by information, driven by customer preferences, whatever it is. They all see it coming and they believe the industry can be just as vital to the future as it has in the past. And it will do so in a different way.”
