Peevey Proposal Making Waves

Here's an update on the post earlier this week abotu Mike Peevey's renewed push for direct access.

Today's San Francsco Chronicle has a hard-hitting editorial that bashes deregulation in general and Peevey's proposal specifically.

The knife-stabbing chorus that is the Chronicle's Editorial Board notes:

"Peevey has claimed that "direct access" is not deregulation. But experts say he's not telling Californians the truth. "This is not going to be helpful to California consumers at all. It's a total triumph of ideology over practicality," said former California PUC Commissioner Loretta Lynch. "Direct access deepened the crisis in 2000. Enron and others had lured consumers away from the utilities, but then they dumped them after the cost of power got too high. That created even more of an artificial shortage on the market."

Meanwhile, Tom Elias goes one-step further. Not content to simply bash the deregulation proposal, he's authored a slam piece on Peevey, himself, and dragged Arnold into it as well fo his decision to re-appoint Peevey to the PUC.

An excerpt from the Elias column:

"So when Schwarzenegger reappointed the current PUC president, Michael Peevey, to another term as the kingpin of what may be the most powerful agency in state government, he was determining part of his legacy.

That legacy will say, in a nutshell, that Schwarzenegger doesn’t give a fig about California’s millions of consumers. Rather, it assures that he will be remembered as one who did the bidding of big business, especially those big businesses who donated money to his various campaign committees.

All it takes is a look at Peevey’s record to see all this. For Peevey, a former president of Edison International, parent company of the Southern California Edison Co., has turned the PUC into a rogue agency whose actions sometimes defy both state law and all logic except that of corporate welfare."

Return of energy deregulation in California? [San Francisco Chronicle]

Arnold shows disregard for consumers [Colusa Sun Herald]