Electricity rates could increase if the California Public Utilities Commission approves a plan to fund a $152 million research project by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The cost and the project itself are strongly opposed by The Utility Reform Network, along with state legislators who say the commission’s president is too close to the project to cast a vote. Read More
Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell has stepped down from overseeing private settlement talks over a deadly Northern California pipeline explosion after state regulators set up a mediation process criticized by several parties as an unfair, backroom deal.
The California Public Utilities Commission appointed the former Senate Majority Leader earlier this month to mediate a settlement aimed at determining how much Pacific Gas & Electric Co. should be fined for the blast. Read More
Politicians and reform groups are denouncing the California Public Utilities Commission’s recent decision to retain an outside mediator to preside over settlement negotiations with PG&E regarding the San Bruno blast. Read More
Who should pay for the San Bruno blast aftermath?
According to a document PG&E filed with state regulators late last month, its customers should be on the hook for 90 percent of the cost to make its pipeline system safer. Read More
Officials with PG&E have reached their conclusion about what caused a natural-gas pipeline to explode in San Bruno last September. And they have concluded the event was not the utility’s fault.
Federal investigators asked PG&E, the agency that regulates it, the city of San Bruno and other parties to submit analyses about what caused and contributed to the San Bruno disaster, which took eight lives and decimated a neighborhood. Read More
PG&E handed some 225,000 pages of documents pertaining to its pipeline welds to state regulators Monday night.The question now is whether anybody will actually read all of them.Earlier this month, an independent panel tasked with scrutinizing both PG&E and its regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, questioned whether the CPUC even had the manpower to read through all the documents it is requiring PG&E to turn over. Read More
After hearing complaints that the investigation into last year’s pipeline explosion in San Bruno was being conducted behind closed doors far too often, on Thursday the president of the California Public Utilities Commission said he intends to open those doors a crack. Read More
