In Memoriam: Sally Streiter-Hunt, one of the founders of the Prize
Sally Streiter-Hunt was a world-renowned expert on the electricity industry who helped to mastermind the privatization of that sector in Britain during the late 1980s – a task which many considered impossible to achieve successfully.
She began her career in the 1960s as a research assistant at the London School of Economics. In the late 1960s, she joined Mayor John V. Lindsay's New York City Budget Bureau, working first on education and then on air and water pollution. Her connection with the Bureau was to be a lasting one; as she remained on the selection committee for the Hayes Prize. She became Assistant Commissioner for air pollution control, and during the energy crisis of 1973 she became Deputy Director of the newly created Energy Office.
When Sally left City government, she joined NERA, an economic consulting firm with a large specialty in energy. She soon became a vice president, testifying in electricity and other energy regulatory cases all over the US and before congressional committees. She was chief economic investigator on the Montana coal tax case, a constitutional case that went to the US Supreme Court. Seeking electric industry experience, she went to Con Edison as corporate economist in the office of the president.
Sally travelled extensively in her later years, advising governments and industry members on how to introduce competition in electricity. She wrote, with Graham Shuttleworth, Competition and Choice in Electricity (Wiley, London 1996), followed by Making Competition Work in Electricity (Wiley, New York 2002). Mrs. Strieter-Hunt consulted in China for 12 years, at the invitation of the World Bank. She also worked at length with the Ministry of Energy in Mexico, helping to draft the white paper on reform of the electric sector, which was published, but went nowhere. She spent much time in California and New Jersey, working with electric utilities as reforms were introduced.
Sally attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. At the time, the total quota for women students at Oxford University was still one thousand, even though they had been permitted to earn Oxford degrees since 1938.