Mr. Spigal is a partner in the Portland office of K&L Gates. Prior to joining K&L Gates, Mr. Spigal was Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Bonneville Power Administration, where he provided executive management and legal expertise to the Administrator/CEO in support of BPA programs in the general areas of transmission, natural resources, power, lands, Federal resources and treaties, generation and finance, personnel, and ratemaking. Mr. Spigal came to K&L Gates after spending 26 years with BPA.
Mr. Spigal works in the Energy and Utility Law practice group. His practice emphasizes transactional matters such as power resource development, facility purchases and sales, power purchases and sales, transmission and interconnection service, power scheduling, and power system reliability.
Mr. Spigal represents independent power producers and utilities in negotiation and drafting agreements to secure interconnection and transmission service, and in disputes with regulated transmission service providers to compel such transmission service providers to provide tariff service in compliance with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission orders.
Mr. Spigal represents publicly-owned utilities in negotiating and drafting contracts for interconnection service and transmission service provided by such utilities to generators. Because the publicly-owned utilities are not subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the contracts are drafted to meet the needs of the publicly-owned utilities, and not the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's pro forma open access transmission tariff.
As Senior Vice President for Transmission for the Bonneville Power Administration, Mr. Spigal helped implement Bonneville's first open access transmission tariff. Mr. Spigal worked on issues related to electric reliability, retail wheeling, transmission to disputed service territories, and transmission congestion and constraints. He served as a member of the Western Systems Coordinating Council's Board of Trustees, and was Chair of the WSCC Committee which led to adoption of the nation's first contract-based reliability management system.
Mr. Spigal serves as primary outside counsel to a limited liability company that initiated development of a 200 MW wind generating facility. In a complex set of contracts, the limited liability company transferred its assets, including leases, a turbine supply agreement and balance of plant contract, to an entity that utilizes production tax credits and sells the project's output to members of the limited liability company.
During his 26 years with the Bonneville Power Administration, Mr. Spigal worked on drafting the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act. He helped defend numerous lawsuits challenging Bonneville's implementation of the Northwest Power Act. Following the Washington Public Power Supply System's default on bonds for two projects, Mr. Spigal participated in negotiations to settle claims resulting from bondholders' lawsuits.