Sonny Popowsky

Sonny Popowsky served as the Consumer Advocate of Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2012. He started his career at the Office of Consumer Advocate (OCA) as an Assistant Consumer Advocate in 1979. He served as the President of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA) from 1996 to 1998 and was previously Chairman of the NASUCA Electric Committee. He served on the Board of Trustees of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) from 1997 to 2001 and the NERC Stakeholders Committee from 2001 to 2006.
In 2010, Mr. Popowsky was appointed by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to the Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee and served as Vice Chair of that Committee from 2012 to 2016. He also served on the Advisory Council of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) from 2014 to 2019. Mr. Popowsky currently serves as Chair of the City of Philadelphia Water, Sewer and Storm Water Rate Board. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, the Boards of Directors of the Energy Coordinating Agency, the Sustainable Energy Fund, and Regional Housing Legal Services, and as a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission Consumer Advisory Council.
In 1988, he briefed and argued the United States Supreme Court case of Duquesne Light Company v. Barasch, in which the Court upheld the position of the OCA that two Pennsylvania electric utilities had no constitutional right to charge consumers for the costs of four cancelled nuclear power plants. Mr. Popowsky graduated Cum Laude from Yale University and received his J.D. Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an Associate Editor of the Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Between college and law school, Mr. Popowsky worked as a newspaper reporter for the Press of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Prior to joining the OCA, he was an Associate at the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz from 1977-1979.