In a post-primary election political swing through the state last Wednesday, California’s Attorney General Bill Lockyer told news media his office is about to file lawsuits against merchant power generators stemming from last year’s electricity crisis. The legal actions could come as early as this week, but the reaction from the independent power producers’ association in the state was “we’ve heard this before.”

Investigations that began in the summer of 2000 are now complete, Lockyer said, and lawsuits will be forthcoming, alleging a variety of violations, including anti-trust infractions, breach of contract, and violations of the state’s unfair business practices statute, which is California’s main anti-fraud law.

“We’ve done sufficient investigation and research, and know there are actions that need to be filed against energy producers,” Lockyer said in a political report in the Los Angeles Times last Thursday.

While welcoming the chance to put the allegations of “gouging” by generators to rest, Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of the California Independent Energy Producers, said that “if there are real issues, they need to be aired,” but he lamented the past 12 to 18 months of “innuendo and trial by headlines.” So far, he said, no facts or evidence have been brought forward.

Gov. Gray Davis, who led the political barnstorming trip through the state with Lockyer and other statewide Democratic officeholders, indicated he plans to use the lawsuits as leverage in his efforts to try to renegotiate some of the much-criticized long-term power supply contracts the state signed last year.

Davis also tried to clarify his selection last Tuesday of former utility and energy services executive Michael Peevey to the five-member California Public Utilities Commission as a means of “balancing” the regulatory panel, which now has a majority of his appointees that are “pro-consumer,” the LA Times report quoted the governor as saying. Peevey will bring someone with “business acumen” on the CPUC, but Davis indicated that did not mean the new appointee would try to revive the state’s failed efforts at deregulation.

“I have said repeatedly that we will go back to energy deregulation over my dead body,” the governor said.

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