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By Ros Krasny
WASHINGTON, June 27 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama hastapped renewable energy advocate Ron Binz as chairman of theFederal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that has madeheadlines in the past year with tough enforcement actionsagainst Wall Street banks.
Binz, a Democrat, was named as a commissioner of theregulator and if confirmed by the U.S. Senate would bedesignated as chairman, the White House said. He would succeedJon Wellinghoff, who announced his resignation in May.
Binz was chairman of the Colorado Public UtilitiesCommission from 2007 to 2011, and now runs Public PolicyConsulting, a regulatory consulting practice.
He is also a policy advisor with the Center for the NewEnergy Economy at Colorado State University, a privately fundedinitiative to support clean energy. He is a former president ofthe Competition Policy Institute, a non-profit group devoted to boosting competition in energy and telecommunications markets.
Binz's time at the Colorado commission was marked by battleswith Republican state legislators and mining interests when thecommission encouraged the state's largest utility to closecoal-fired plants near Denver.
The Colorado Mining Association, an industry group, clashedwith Binz in 2010 over what it termed the appearance of bias inthe commission's treatment of coal plants and efforts to promotenew plants that would run on natural gas.
FERC, which has about 1,500 employees, regulates elements ofthe U.S. natural gas, electricity, oil and hydropowerindustries.
In recent years the agency has engineered a massiveexpansion of its enforcement operations that followed thepassage of sweeping energy legislation passed in 2005.
FERC's enforcement division has about 200 staff, up fromabout 20 a decade ago, including many lawyers and former traderswith deep knowledge of power markets. It is led by Norman Bay, aformer U.S. district attorney from New Mexico, and otherlaw-enforcement heavyweights.
Over the past year the regulator has flexed its new muscleswith a series of headline-grabbing fines and investigationsagainst large banks.
The actions include a proposed record $470 million fine forBritish bank Barclays for alleged manipulation of theelectricity market.
FERC also imposed a temporary ban on JPMorgan Chase & Co's energy trading arm from part of the domestic powermarket.
Binz's selection was praised by the Public ServiceEnterprise Group, a New Jersey electric generation company, foropening FERC up to "thoughtful consideration of emergingopportunities."
