New Day for Prudence
I am sending this letter at the request of Robert Gruber, who is the executive director of the Public Staff-North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC), which is the state agency charged with representing the public in matters before the NCUC. In the article, “New Day for Prudence,” (by Kris R. Nielson, Patricia Galloway and Charles Whitney, December 2009) the authors state (p. 49) that, in North Carolina, “the Office of Public Counsel filed testimony creating even more uncertainty as to how prudence reviews of costs not yet incurred would be handled.” The group that filed the quoted testimony is not “the Office of Public Counsel.” It consists of a number of non-profits and associations that banded together and called themselves the Public Advocacy Groups for the purpose of intervening before the NCUC. This group includes the following: the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC Warn), Public Citizen, the NC Public Interest Research Group, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads, Clean Water for North Carolina, and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. (In at least one response, Duke called these parties the “Anti-Nuclear Groups.”)