Abby S. Arnold
Vice President and Senior Mediator
aarnold@kearnswest.com

Abby S. Arnold brings to the job of Vice President and Senior Mediator more than twenty years experience advising public and private sector leaders on policy development and designing and facilitating policy dialogues, collaborative consensus-building efforts, regulatory negotiations and commercial private sector projects in the arenas of energy, environment, and natural resources.

Abby’s passion the last fifteen years has been working with stakeholders to achieve sustainable commercialization of emerging clean technologies. She is conversant in wind, geothermal, solar, and other renewable technologies, energy efficiency, demand side management, and transmission planning. Her specific interest is the design of collaborative processes that bring diverse stakeholders together, incorporating the best available technical information into decision-making processes so that parties can find common ground and achieve their goals. She has designed and managed three such public-private renewable energy collaboratives over the past 15 years: the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative (www.nationalwind.org); Geothermal Collaborative; and the recently formed American Wind Wildlife Institute.

Based in Kearns & West’s Washington DC office, Abby has worked in more than 40 states in most regions of the US and parts of Canada, She provides neutral process services for federal public agencies and facilitated stakeholder involvement for state energy and resource agencies, private utilities, regional leadership organizations and inter-agency compacts, and many nonprofit and conservation organizations. She is comfortable within the engineering and scientific community, having facilitated numerous multi-stakeholder projects for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, National Electricity Research Council, Utility Wind Interest Group, The Wildlife Society, EPA’s National Research Council, and Science Advisory Board. She also designs and offers quality trainings on negotiation skills, facilitation, public involvement, strategic planning and consensus building to public and private entities.

Abby is based in Kearns & West’s Washington DC office. She has a Masters Degree from the Kennedy School of Public Policy, Harvard and a Bachelors Degree with Honors in Environmental Planning and Political Theory from University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a member of the Women in Energy, the National Association for conflict Resolution, and a roster member of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution.

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