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Rick Hornby

Rick Hornby is a senior consultant at Synapse Energy Economics. He has worked in the energy industry since 1976 as a regulatory consultant, senior civil servant, and project engineer. Mr. Hornby's primary areas of focus are resource planning and ratemaking in the electricity and natural gas industries, with particular emphasis on energy efficiency and smart grid . He has provided expert testimony and litigation support on these issues in over 100 proceedings on behalf of utility regulators, consumer advocates, environmental groups, energy marketers, gas producers, and utilities.

Mr. Hornby has a Master of Science in Technology and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Industrial Engineering from Dalhousie University. Prior to joining Synapse, Mr. Hornby was a Principal with CRA International, formerly Tabors Caramanis & Associates. He also held positions as Director of the Energy Group and Manager of the Natural Gas Program at the Tellus Institute (formerly Energy Systems Research Group). Earlier in his career he served as Assistant Deputy Minister of Energy in the Nova Scotia Department of Mines and Energy and as a Member of the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Oil and Gas Board. Mr. Hornby has also been a project engineer responsible for energy management programs in industry.

Since joining Synapse in 2006, Mr. Hornby has analyzed a range of electricity resource planning and ratemaking issues for staff of regulatory commissions, consumer advocates and environmental groups. He has addressed the alignment of financial incentives with aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency by electric and gas utilities, including the "save-a-watt" approach proposed by Duke Energy, in testimony filed in North Carolina, Indiana, South Carolina, Minnesota, and Alaska. He led the research for the NAPEE report Discussion of Consumer Perspectives of Regulation of Energy Efficiency Investments. He has prepared reports on this issue for clients in Massachusetts, Arkansas and Ontario and presented workshops sponsored by the Conservation Law Foundation, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Izaak Walton League and Institute of Public Utilities. Other representative ratemaking cases include testimony and evaluations of proposals for investments in smart meter or advanced metering infrastructure (smart grid or AMI) projects in several states, including the Baltimore Gas and Electric case. Representative resource planning cases include the development of long-term projections of avoided costs of electricity and natural gas in New England for a coalition of utility program administrators in 2007 and again in 2009.