Today Mona and I attended a meeting of the "California Energy Solutions
Group" (formerly the AB 1890 Implementation Group). But for the issues
discussed below, there's not much else to report from the meeting other than
folks engaged in a good deal of posturing.

At our urging, the group decided to form a "subcommittee" comprised of a
subset of the group. The group will work quickly to develop a "strawperson"
proposal to present to the larger group for consideration. The goal is to
quickly arrive at a "settlement"---ideally by year end, or sooner---that
everyone can agree to and offer up to Davis, legislators, etc.

Our "reward" for coming up with the idea is the requirement that we serve on
the "committee." In addition to us, the other people on the committee are:

Eve Elsesser will chair the committee---Cogen types
John Fielder---Edison
Mike Florio--TURN
Bill Booth---CLECA
Carolyn McIntyre---Sempra
Smutney--Generators
Aaron Thomas--AES (retail)
Tony Braun--Munis
Ralph Cavanagh--NRDC
John Flory--CALPX

It is clear that one of the key issues is devising the "benchmark" that the
CPUC can use to judge the reasonableness of utility purchases---similar to
the model used for utility procurement on the gas side. Chris Calger is in
the office working on the power plant deals and I briefly discussed with him
ways of devising a politically palatable, commercially defensible benchmark.
We came up with some ideas that he suggested I pursue further with Bob
Badeer, Chris Foster and Tim Belden, which I'll do on Monday. The first
meeting of the subcommittee is on Tuesday.

If possible, I'd like to add the "benchmark" and "committee" issues to our
agenda for Tuesday's meeting.

Best,
Jeff