Ed Patricoff has spent more than three decades resolving disputes for power, fuel, financial-services, and aviation clients across six continents. He also writes for POWER, the trade magazine of the power generation industry. Two of his commentaries are worth revisiting.
Before you enter a new market, do your due diligence (2019)
Ed’s December 2019 commentary is a field guide to the ways well-run U.S. companies lose money abroad by assuming the local legal system works like ours. He identifies three traps. The first is the personal-property-securities regimes in Australia, New Zealand, and several Canadian provinces, where a company that fails to register its ownership interest in-country can find its own equipment swept up by a counterparty’s creditors. The second is conflicting mandates among agencies of the same government: he describes a Tanzanian revenue authority that imposed a $12 million tax bill on a project whose contract was supposed to be tax-free, then impounded equipment, a dispute that eventually drew the attention of Congress. The third is anti-money-laundering exposure — the risk that a local partner receives illicit funds that pass through U.S. financial institutions, putting the American company’s assets at risk of seizure. His conclusion is unglamorous and correct: retain counsel who know the target country and diligence both the jurisdiction and the counterparty before the deal is signed.
Transitioning to a cleaner energy future without sacrificing reliability (2025)
Written in February 2025, a few months before Ed joined the firm, this longer piece takes up the reliability side of the energy transition. Demand is surging — data centers, electric vehicles, industrial load — while much of the grid is aging. Ed walks through the tradeoffs source by source: natural gas as a bridge fuel with lower emissions than coal and fast deployment; nuclear as the densest and most reliable option, with capacity factors near 90 percent compared with 15 to 45 percent for wind and solar; and an honest accounting of solar’s intermittency and recycling problems and wind’s dependence on weather. He closes by recommending mobile gas turbines as temporary grid stabilizers during the build-out of renewables, and a staged transition rather than a rushed phase-out of existing generation.
Readers interested in the international dimension of the same debate can also find his December 2020 commentary, written with Ana Sarmento, on the challenges of rapid renewables deployment in Haiti, Angola, and South Australia.
Read: International Business: Before You Enter a New Market, Do Your Due Diligence — POWER, December 2, 2019
Read: Transitioning to a Cleaner Energy Future Without Sacrificing Reliability — POWER, February 27, 2025
Read: Global Rush Toward Renewables Faces Challenges — POWER, December 1, 2020 (with Ana Sarmento)
About Harold E. (Ed) Patricoff, Jr.
Ed Patricoff is a shareholder in the firm’s Miami office, where he practices international dispute resolution, litigation, arbitration, and regulatory matters. With more than three decades of experience across North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia, he is widely known for his work in the power generation, fuel, financial services, and aviation industries.
Publication spotlights summarize work our attorneys have published elsewhere; the views expressed in the original pieces are the authors’ own. Insights posts are offered for general information and are not legal advice.
