Rich is a former reporter and editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he began covering the electric industry as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware introduced competition in the late 1990s. His coverage won the National Press Foundation’s 1998 award for energy reporting. He later headed a Houston-based startup that produced hourly power indexes and worked as an energy analyst for Bloomberg Government. In between, he worked for eight years in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Enforcement, where he became a whistleblower — proving he was not cut out for government work. He holds a journalism degree from Penn State University and an MBA from Temple University.