Averill Conn Helps Bring Renewable Energy to Texas

Averill Conn didn’t set out to be an expert in the renewable energy space. Despite starting an environmental club in middle school (the wonderfully named SOAR for “Save Our Awesome Rainforest”) that sold macadamia nut cookies for the betterment of the Amazon, Conn views her expertise in renewables as an extension of her family’s long ties to the traditional energy industry.

Conn, a proud fifth-generation Texan, is the granddaughter of an oil field trucker. Her husband is in the oil field service business, and the attorney started her career supporting the development, construction, and operation of natural gas plants in the mid-2000s. It was experience Conn sought out instead of more traditional upstream oil and gas because she could see where the future was heading.

“I have so many dear friends and family in oil and gas, but I think Texas can be known as so much more than that,” Conn says. “Texas was early in building wind farms out in West Texas that have now expanded to the Gulf Coast. There is incredible solar progress happening in South Texas. We have so much wind and so much sun, and Texas is traditionally very friendly to businesses looking to build. I think Texas has a real leadership role in this space, and I’m proud to be here.”

Conn, who received the Senior Counsel of the Year (Large Legal Department) from the Texas Law Book in 2023 and was a finalist for the Texas General Counsel Forum’s Magna Stella Awards in 2014, knows that most lawyers working in the renewable energy space are either in San Francisco, New York City, or Washington DC. She doesn’t see a problem with that, but it just makes her Houston-based practice all the more important in getting the word out to the rest of the country. Texas isn’t just for drilling anymore.

Part of Conn’s interest in the space lies in the sheer novelty of the work. The attorney was instrumental in helping install electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the 2010s ahead of Nissan’s release of its landmark EV, the LEAF, let alone Tesla’s Model 3. In many ways, people like Conn were working to build a space that did not previously exist, and so adaptability and being willing to take some risks were difficult work requirements.

“There is an aspect of making it up as you’re going along,” Conn says. “To me, that’s fun. So much of development work is team-oriented, and so you’re interacting with engineers, financial experts, marketing, and regulatory people who are all working across their disciplines to bring this to life.”

Those are the kind of interactions that were instrumental in bringing Conn in-house in the first place. She and a former client had a long-running joke about how Conn’s job was to “translate engineer” for him to make his work more easily understandable to people outside his space. That’s work she relishes because it ultimately unites a team and helps a project move forward.

Translating either engineering or difficult legal concepts, Conn says, is one of her superpowers. She’s always had a knack for making complex subjects easily digestible in writing, and it’s a skill that’s made her uniquely successful in-house, especially in a field that can be so full of jargon and industry-language-specific.

“I think communicating clearly and concisely and being transparent is just who I’ve always been,” the AGC says. “I try very hard to mean what I say and practice what I preach. Ultimately, we’re only as good as our reputations, and I take my role as an attorney and counselor very seriously. I’m in a service profession, and you really have to have the trust of your clients.”

Conn’s outlook on the energy space is not a winner-take-all premise. She says around 80 percent of her work supports renewal projects, but she also spends other time supporting broader businesses in the energy space, from upstream E&P to refining and “conventional” thermal power generation.

“You see so many international energy companies looking around and realizing that they’ve been in business for sixty years and want to be in business for another sixty,” Conn says. “There are transitional energy spaces, but the future is moving to truly renewable energy sources, and that’s the future we want to be part of.”

Conn’s own move to renewables was an organic one, but she’s now serving as an important advocate for Texas’s own renewable efforts. Sure, she’s built renewable energy all over the country, but the daughter of Texas understands that even in the heart of oil country, renewable energy can have a strong home base.