Kim O’Guinn to serve as SPP director of state regulatory policy
LITTLE ROCK, ARK. — Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has chosen Arkansas Public Service Commission (PSC) Commissioner Kim O’Guinn to serve as director of state regulatory policy, effective January 2023.
In her role, O’Guinn will lead SPP’s state regulatory policy efforts and support the company’s work on related regional transmission organization policy matters, interacting with a wide array of stakeholder groups and organizations.
“SPP is thrilled to welcome Kim to our team,” said Paul Suskie, SPP executive vice president of regulatory policy. “As a former president of the Regional State Committee (RSC), Kim is very familiar with SPP, and her experience as a nationally respected commissioner is a great asset to the organization.”
The RSC is part of SPP’s governance and consists of utility regulators from across its 15-state region.
O’Guinn is an environmental engineer with more than two decades of regulatory experience in the utility industry. Most recently, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson appointed her to serve as an Arkansas Public Service Commissioner in 2016.
“I am very excited to be a part of the SPP team,” said O’Guinn.“My career has been dedicated to regulatory issues, which provided me an opportunity to work with SPP and its stakeholders during my tenure at the PSC. I look forward to working with an amazing team of people.”
Before her role at the Arkansas PSC, O’Guinn served as the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s director of communication and permit engineer at the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Air.
O’Guinn has served in leadership roles with the Entergy Regional State Committee, the Organization of MISO States, SPP’s RSC, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the Electric Power Research Institute Advisory Council, Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, the American Association of Blacks in Energy and Arkansas Women in Power. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.