White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Barry Worthington: A Man of Great Works and Great Decency

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Barry Worthington, who was executive director of the U.S. Energy Association for 31 years, died prematurely on Aug. 14, 2020. This is a remembrance of him, a dear friend, which I wrote at the time.

Barry Worthington was the most extraordinary ordinary man. Unpretentious, self-effacing, decent to the extreme, casual, and abundantly capable. He left a mark on electric utilities worldwide; and here, in the United States, on hundreds of energy denizens from senators to cabinet secretaries, and CEOs of companies crammed into the Fortune 500. He was, simply, exemplary — at once everyman and unique.

He stood on more podiums than many political candidates and delivered profound speeches in a conversational, clubby way. He walked with potentates and political savants from across the world and talked with them unaffectedly, as though he was leaning over a neighbor’s fence.

Barry’s travels were the stuff of awe and legend: off to Beijing, Dubai or Rio de Janeiro today, and back tomorrow. If there were a prize for speed of travel turnaround, Barry would have won it over and over.

He told me that he had promised his wife Louise, a school principal, he would always get back as fast as possible. I think it was otherwise: I think home was where Barry’s heart was and he would rather be home in Laytonsville, Maryland than dining in Paris or sightseeing in Patagonia. If he had a place he preferred more than Laytonsville, it was the family condominium in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Barry, for all the travel and international importance, was quintessentially a family man. He, Louise, Barry and Kerry, his now adult children, loved doing things together, quite simple, very American things like summering at the beach, going to Hard Rock Cafés, and visiting Disney theme parks.

He was, for 31 years until his so-untimely death at age 66, executive director of the United States Energy Association. Under his gentle direction, the USEA grew from a moribund organization on a sharp downward trajectory to a $10-million-a-year, globe-circling player.

The USEA is a nonpartisan, non-lobbying organization, dating back to 1935, that promotes all forms of energy, based on the fundamental creed that energy is good for people. As its executive director, Barry was good for people, too.

Barry was educated at Penn State University and the University of Houston. He sought a career in energy at a time when the energy crisis appeared as though it would last forever and bend the future.

Houston Power & Lighting Company hired Barry as a trainee executive. He caught the eye of its legendary chairman, Don D. Jordan, and the two kept in touch. Barry often quoted Jordan in conversation.

Barry was offered a job with the nonprofit Thomas Alva Edison Institute. “I took it because it was twice the pay, and we were young and broke,” Barry told me.

The institute was foundering, and Barry accepted an offer to head the USEA which was itself a financial basket case. It had made a lot of money in 1974, when it hosted the World Energy Conference in Detroit, but that windfall was dwindling when Barry arrived. “It had expenses of $250,000 a year and income of $200,000,” Barry told me at lunch last January.

Something had to be done and quiet, unassuming Barry was the man to do it.

There was no way the USEA’s modest dues structure would support a revival. Products and services had to be added. Barry increased the number of revenue meetings, briefings and events, and boosted the role of industry briefings. As the publisher and editor in chief of The Energy Daily, I was able to introduce media breakfasts at the USEA.

Barry increased the usefulness of the USEA to its members. Although it had a special relationship with electricity, oil and natural gas companies found its services and contact matrix useful. The USEA’s work on carbon capture, utilization and storage has been pioneering.

When Barry brought in the United States Agency for International Development, the USEA found an unexpected mission: It began creative and cost-effective collaborations, pairing American electric utilities with those in the former Soviet Union to teach them best practices and establish a commercial basis. Sometimes these have included oil companies, but the bulk of the 80 “partnerships” have been in electricity and ranged from ratemaking to plant operation to fuel optimization. In eastern Europe, the first measure was to boost the cycles from 48.6 to conform with the western European standard of 50.

Today, these partnerships are a brilliant feature of foreign policy and have extended to South Asia and Africa.

A friend to many, Barry Worthington, has left us, but his light is not extinguished: It shines brightly across the world and in the hearts of those of us lucky to have known him. I was so favored for more than 30 years.

Power Africa: The Grass Is Singing

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It is a lasting memory of Africa: men walking dozens of miles searching for firewood. No stick is dismissed and is added to a bundle, mostly carried on the head.
 
In most of Africa, all 54 countries lying south of the Sahara Desert, food is a problem and so is something to cook it with. As populations have grown, so has destructive deforestation.
 
The problem is not confined to rural areas. It spreads out from the shanty towns that surround the cities. There is no electricity, so something must be burned. Of course, it means dismal living conditions. Life without electricity fits Hobbes' description of life after war: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
 
Against this background, President Barack Obama has proposed a $7 billion electrification initiative. To use an expression adopted from T.S. Eliot but popular in Africa, the grass must be singing.
 
It is the right proposal at the right time, but it is also fraught with huge difficulties of implementation.
 
The administration is quick to admit that to bring electricity to the 70 percent of Africans who do not have it will cost $300 billion, more to maintain the deteriorating electric systems that already exist in and around the cities.
 
Barry Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, part of the World Energy Council (WEC), and an expert on African energy, says the president is to be commended “at least for raising the issue of the people who have no electricity and what that does to economies as well as the lives of the people.”
 
For years, Worthington says, the WEC and organizations like the World Bank have been trying to draw attention to the pitiable electric supply situation in Africa.
 
But he also says the fix will not be quick. The 54 countries that make up Africa south of Sahara Desert are among the most difficult in which to do business.
 
To start, there is something a little dreamy about Obama's belief that the task will be undertaken by public-private partnerships. This is a concept more alluring in theory than in practice.
 
Obama will find that before they invest, corporations need to know what their chances of making money commensurate with the risks will be be. To do this they need political stability, respect for property rights, and a legal system where they can seek redress if things go wrong. These basics are in short supply in nearly all over Sub-Saharan Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa.
 
But looming above all is the destructive force of corruption. Corruption in Africa is interpreted as capitalism in practice. It has no shame; it is the way of the world.
 
In Zambia, for example, western mining companies that had operated copper mines there before and after a period of nationalization pulled out a decade ago abandoning hundreds of millions in new investment because corruption — sometimes operating as a kind of political protection money – became so severe that the mines could not operate and needed investment was wasted. The Chinese became major players.
 
Two years ago, it appeared the Chinese had found new ways of dealing with the corruption issue but that seems to be faltering. Ghana is awash with Chinese freelance gold prospectors, who were initially encouraged to come and pan for alluvial gold; now they are being driven from the mining claims by corrupt licensing officials and gangs of thugs. China is not exempt.
 
Africa is rich in energy with coal, gas, oil, rivers suitable for hydroelectrical development, sunshine and uranium. Yet global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have a proprietorial attitude to Africa, and they subscribe to a kind of environmental imperialism in which only “renewable” technologies that get their seal of approval should be pursued.
 
Hardly had Obama finished his speech than Emira Woods of the Institute for Policy Studies was on the PBS NewsHour denouncing coal, gas and hydro as environmentally unacceptable African power systems. One assumes that leaves wind and solar; not enough heft there to lift up a continent.
 
There have been electric power successes in countries like Botswana, Cameroon and Tanzania. Worthington says: “At least the president has shone a light on the crisis. The need is great.”
 
The grass may indeed be singing, but softly. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate