Recusing

With one commissioner dissenting and another recusing himself, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Thursday voted 3-1 to authorize the confidential natural gas wholesale hedging plans of the state’s three major private-sector gas utilities for the coming winter season. The approval places all the costs and benefits of the programs on the utilities’ ratepayers who are the beneficiaries of the hedging, the CPUC said, although Commissioner Geoffrey Brown disagreed.

Although recusing himself from the initial energy agenda items, the newest member of the five-person California Pubic Utilities Commission (CPUC), John Bohn, was sworn into office Thursday and minutes later attended the CPUC’s regularly scheduled biweekly business meeting, which included a formal introduction by CPUC President Michael Peevey. Bohn, 67, a Harvard law graduate appointed last Monday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said he hopes to “give back a little bit to the state of California” in which he was born. Although having been sworn in 15 minutes ahead of the meeting, Bohn said he would “recuse” himself on all energy issues on the agenda, and “abstain on all matters other than the broadband report,” noting that was what he called “an appropriate way to proceed.” His nomination will require state Senate confirmation as will the appointment of Dian Grueneich, who was named in January to a spot on the commission. On a more somber note, Peevey announced the deaths of two former CPUC commissioners, one of whom, Don Vial, was a close personal friend of his who headed the CPUC in the 1980s, and most recently was one of the board members on the now disbanded California Power Authority that was created in mid-2001 in response to the state’s energy crisis at the time. In addition to Vial, 81, who died last Friday in San Rafaeil, CA, the state’s first female CPUC commissioner, Claire Dedrich, 74, passed away earlier in the month at her home in Sacramento. Vial was a labor economists, Dedrich, a Ph.D microbiologist.