S. David Freeman, green energy pioneer and former SMUD chief, dies at 94

S. David Freeman, the gregarious former SMUD general manager known for his quick wit, ever-present cowboy hat and fierce devotion to green energy, died Tuesday. He was 94.

A career utility man, Freeman ran the Sacramento Municipal Utility District for four years in the early 1990s and is credited with rescuing SMUD from a costly fiasco — the mothballing of the Rancho Seco nuclear plant.

He also ran the federal government’s massive electric utility in his home state, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He also served on the staffs of former Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Carter, and his circle of acquaintances and bosses included the likes of former Gov. Gray Davis and Carroll Shelby, the race-car architect.

“He had this distinguished career in public power but he was also this great spirit, funny, and self-deprecating. We’re going to miss him,” said his friend V. John White, a longtime Sacramento lobbyist on energy and environmental issues. “He had a vision and he inspired a lot of us.”

The son of a Chattanooga shopkeeper, Freeman earned an electrical engineering degree at Georgia Tech and a law degree from the University of Tennessee. He was rarely seen in public without his cowboy hat and called himself the “green cowboy,” a reference to his fierce devotion to renewable energy.

“He wasn’t much of a cowboy but he was certainly green,” White said.

When he arrived at SMUD, the utility was reeling from the expensive burden of Rancho Seco — voters had ordered the nuclear plant closed in 1989, and the utility was facing bloated costs and other problems.

“When he applied for the position as general manager at SMUD we asked him for job references,” said Ed Smeloff, a SMUD board member at that time who helped recruit Freeman. “He gave President Jimmy Carter as a reference. I called Carter and left a message. He called me back the next day and told me Dave helped save the TVA.”

Helped transform SMUD

At SMUD, Freeman reduced costs, brought down rates, and instituted conservation policies that were pioneering at the time, such as paying customers to discard their power-hungry old refrigerators. The utility developed a reputation as a leader on conservation and green energy.

“I helped bury Rancho Seco when I was general manger of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in 1990,” he wrote on a 2016 Sacramento Bee opinion piece bidding good riddance to PG&E’s nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. “And contrary to the dire predictions, the lights stayed on, the rates didn’t go up and SMUD has behaved rather well ever since.”

But he wasn’t shy about chastising his old employer. He came back to Sacramento a few months ago to lobby the SMUD board on a controversial solar energy policy. California was implementing a solar-energy mandate on new home construction, and SMUD wanted to give homeowners the option of tapping into SMUD’s existing solar farms instead.

Freeman was furious, saying the plan would undermine solar energy, and he accused SMUD of turning its back on renewables. “Fundamentally, public power is the voice of the people. It’s not a company with a monopoly, and that’s kind of the way they’re behaving,” he said of SMUD’s managers.

SMUD went ahead with the policy anyway, and so did the California Energy Commission. But Freeman never stopped advocating for renewable power.

“His legacy will go on, because if we do not do what he recommended, we will not have an Earth,” said his daughter Anita Hopkins. “He worked really hard his whole life to make an impact.”

Freeman was rarely out of the public eye. He dabbled in politics, running unsuccessfully for an Assembly seat in Southern California in 2000 while drawing criticism for accepting campaign donations from big power companies. He ran the New York Power Authority at the urging of Gov. Mario Cuomo, and he famously returned to Sacramento on another rescue mission in 2001. This time he was recruited to help Davis manage the state’s energy crisis.

Freeman’s job was to help negotiate billions of dollars worth of long-term energy contracts on behalf of California’s investor-owned utilities, which were being bled dry by runaway electricity prices imposed by power generators and traders like Enron. White and other environmentalists were dismayed that the power contracts ignored renewable energy. But the contracts had the effect of taming the huge spikes in electricity prices.

Years later, after the rogue trading practices pioneered by Enron were uncovered, California was able to recover billions of dollars in refunds from the energy suppliers who signed the contracts.

In the meantime, Freeman had moved onto another green power initiative: In the mid 2000s, he became head of the Hydrogen Car Co., where he teamed with legendary race-car designer Carroll Shelby to design a line of hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Freeman never stopped working on green power initiatives, speaking out about green power. Two weeks before his death, he joined the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a group based in Tennessee, as senior energy advisor.