Elise Zoli

With a keen sense of the clean energy and water markets and opportunities, Elise N, Zoli provides strategic direction and advice to the nation’s leading public and private enterprises. Her experience focuses on the development, financing (impact investment, hedge fund, private equity, governmental grant, and alternative funding), and operation of clean energy, water, and related infrastructure projects and services.

She has extensive experience with a variety of clean energy technologies, including nuclear, solar, wind, fuel cell and battery, energy storage, micro- and smart-grid, and water, as well as the associated environmental attribute (RPS, REC, carbon credit) markets. In conjunction with her transactional work, Elise also has pioneered the use of risk-mitigation instruments, including insurance, designed to facilitate new market entrants.

Elise has extensive first-chair experience in large-scale energy- and water-related arbitration and litigation, including on behalf of renewables component manufacturers, energy purchasers, and energy facility owners and operators. This experience reflects work before commercial arbitrators, federal and state regulatory tribunals, and in federal and state courts on issues important to the energy sector.

A prominent lawyer in the nuclear sector, Elise has experience that extends beyond transactional work to the use and release of radioisotopes, as well as the operation, decommissioning, and redevelopment of nuclear power plants, former defense sites, laboratories, and industrial facilities that employ radioisotopes.

Elise is a periodic lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a member of the clean energy committee for the New England Clean Energy Council.

EDUCATION:

• University of Pennsylvania (J.D. 1990);
• Duke University (B.A. magna cum laude 1987)

BAR ADMISSIONS:

• Massachusetts;
• New York;
• U.S. Supreme Court;
• U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia, First, Second, and Ninth Circuits;
• U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts

EXPERIENCE:

• Mass. v. EPA, in which the U.S. Supreme Court authorized EPA-based carbon regulation.
• Entergy v. Riverkeeper, in which the U.S. Supreme Court approved the use of rationale cost-benefit analysis in the development of federal water use regulations for large-scale power production and industrial facilities.
• Entergy v. Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, in which the Massachusetts judiciary rejected the Massachusetts DEP’s regulatory overreach with respect to water use.
• In re: Entergy Discharge Permit, in which the specially constituted Vermont Environmental Court and Vermont Supreme Court approved of increased thermal discharges to the Connecticut River.