Dialogue
Mike Peevey is a former President and Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission.
Ahmad Faruqui is a principal with The Brattle Group. He is an energy economist whose career has been devoted to pricing innovations. He has designed and evaluated a variety of pricing experiments in the U.S. and abroad and maintains a global database of more than three hundred tests of time-varying rates. Faruqui has testified on rate-related issues in several jurisdictions and presents frequently on tariff reforms.
It was during the darkest of times in California that the Governor appointed Mike Peevey to the Public Utility Commission. Recovering in 2002 from the recent California energy crisis and amid revelations that energy giant Enron played an oversized role in the debacle, Peevey became the president of the PUC by year-end. Months later the Governor (aptly Gray Davis) paid the price losing a recall election. The succeeding Governor, the Terminator aka Arnold Schwarzenegger, reappointed Peevey during sunnier days in 2008 and he served until that second term expired year-end 2014.
Few if any are in a better position to provide a thoughtful commentary on the trends in California utility regulation and policy that brought us to today. Indeed, preceding Peevey's dozen years at the PUC he served as president of Edison International and Southern California Edison and then president of NewEnergy. He literally made a career of being president of important institutions in our industry. Below, the dynamo of dynamic pricing, Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, sits down with Peevey to discuss this policy and how it fared or didn't within the Golden State. Let's listen in.