Tom Tanton

Mr. Tanton is a senior fellow at Reason Foundation. He is also president of T 2 & Associates, a firm providing consulting services to the energy and technology industries, and director of science and technology assessment with Energy and Environment Legal Institute, a national non-profit energy think tank.

Mr. Tanton has 40 years' experience in energy technology and legislation. Until 2000, he was the principal policy advisor with the California Energy Commission (CEC) in Sacramento, California, having begun his career there in 1976. At the CEC, Tanton developed and implemented policies and legislation on energy issues of importance to California, the U.S. and international markets, including electric restructuring, gasoline and natural gas supply and pricing, energy facility siting and permitting, environmental issues, power plant siting, technology development and transportation. He completed the first assessment of environmental externalities used in regulatory settings. Mr. Tanton held primary responsibility for comparative economic analysis, environmental assessment of new technologies, and the evaluation of alternatives under state and federal environmental law.

As the general manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, from 2000 to 2003, Mr. Tanton was responsible for the overall management and direction of collaborative research and development programs in electric generation technologies, integrating technology, market infrastructure and public policy. From 2003 through 2007, Mr. Tanton was a senior fellow and vice president of the Houston based Institute for Energy Research. He has also been a guest lecturer in the Master in Environmental Science program at California State University Sacramento (CSUS), lecturing on power plant and electric grid technologies and their comparative environmental impacts. Mr. Tanton earned a B.S. in chemical spectroscopy from San Diego State University.