W. Scott Miller III
WPTF Executive Director

WPTF is a broad-based organization with over 100-member companies, dedicating to encouraging competition in Western states electric markets. Scott comes to this position from a background that has been dedicated to competitive electric and natural gas markets.

Prior to coming to WPTF, Scott was the Senior Market Advisor in the Policy Office at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from 2008-2017. He was responsible for advising the Commission and staff on electric and natural gas markets.

Barbara Sugg
President & CEO

Southwest Power Pool

Barbara Sugg became President and CEO of Southwest Power Pool, Inc. in April 2020.

In her current position, she is responsible for ensuring SPP achieves its mission and goals and serves on the board of directors. Prior to this position, Sugg served SPP members as senior vice president of IT and chief security officer.

Sugg has over 30 years of IT experience in the electric utility industry. She started her career at SPP as a software developer and worked her way up to the executive level throughout her career at SPP.

She’s a proud Ragin’ Cajun, as she earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1986.

She completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2013.

Sugg participates in several industry organizations as well as community and philanthropic boards.

In 2018, she became a certified executive coach and together with other successful business leaders in the community founded the Leadership Foundation for Women, a nonprofit focused on equipping women for success, based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

FERC Commissioner
Mark C. Christie

Commissioner Mark C. Christie took office on January 4, 2021, after having been nominated by President Trump in July 2020 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 30, 2020. 

Immediately before joining FERC, Commissioner Christie was the Chairman of the Virginia State Corporation Commission (Virginia SCC), on which he served for nearly 17 years.  He was elected to the Virginia SCC, which regulates utilities, insurance and banking, three times by the Virginia legislature on bipartisan votes. 

During Commissioner Christie’s service as a state regulator, he was elected president of the Organization of PJM States, Inc. (OPSI), an organization of utility regulators representing the 13 states and the District of Columbia which participate in the PJM transmission and markets organization.  He served for more than a decade on the OPSI governing board.  Commissioner Christie also served as president of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners (MACRUC), a regional chapter of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC).  

Commissioner Christie taught regulatory law for a decade as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Virginia School of Law and constitutional law and government for 20 years in a doctoral program at Virginia Commonwealth University.   

Commissioner Christie is a magna cum laude graduate of Wake Forest University, where he earned Phi Beta Kappa and degrees in History and English.  He earned his law degree at Georgetown, where he completed a summer clerkship after his first year in the FERC Office of General Counsel, which was then housed in the old building on North Capitol Street.  He is a graduate of the public schools of Welch, West Virginia, where he grew up. 

Commissioner Christie served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. Semper Fi.