George W. Crocker About the Speaker Mr. Crocker co-founded the North American Water Office (NAWO) in 1982 with his wife Lea Foushee because of lessons learned during the North Dakota/West Central Minnesota powerline struggle chronicled by the late Senator Paul Wellstone and Dr. Mike Casper in the book, POWERLINE: The First Battle of America’s Energy War. Under Mr. Crocker’s direction as Executive Director, NAWO intervened in a wide variety of electric utility decision-making proceedings, including rulemaking, certificate of need, rate-making, and Integrated Resource Planning. NAWO spearheaded the opposition to dry cask storage of high-level nuclear waste at the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant which ultimately led to legislative mandates in 1994 that brought modern renewable energy technologies up to the utility scale in North America. Mr. Crocker provided key leadership for Community-Based Energy Development (C-BED) legislation that passed into law in Minnesota in 2005. His analyti