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Your understanding was correct. In light of recent changes in the California
regulatory environment (eg the recent rate order) I don't think it makes sense for us to distribute the document at this time, so you can ignore the request. Thanks Peter Augustini <paugustini@CERA.com< 03/29/2001 06:18 PM To: "'skean@enron.com'" <skean@enron.com< cc: David Gibbons <dgibbons@CERA.com< Subject: request to CERA Steve: Thanks for your note, sorry I missed you. From your message I think there may be some miscommunication between your PR guys and us. We understood that your PR people wanted to reprint the Op-ed and redistribute it to as-yet-undetermined people, along with various Enron material. They also wanted to post it on Enron's public web site. But your message seemed to indicate you just want to post the op-ed on your intranet - for educational use only for your internal folks. If this is correct, we would have no problem with it. In fact, we have posted the op-ed on the CERA web page - which is theoretically available to every Enron employee for internal use only. If you want you could just post a link to the CERA web site so your people could get direct access to all our research on the topic. If I misunderstood you, and you do want to redistribute the piece to third-parties -- that is a much bigger issue because it involves our intellectual property and branding issues. Obviously, we would need to talk some more about this. I hope this helps. On a somewhat-related note, we are also getting sucked more and more into the California vortex, and being asked to help in areas that are not our traditional business, such as expert witness testimony and policy issues. While we are not afraid to take a point of view (as you know!) we must maintain a neutral and independent posture. This is sometimes a difficult path to navigate, but we are exploring two areas that may also interest Enron: 1. We have examined Joskow and FERC's analysis on the price gouging issue and we believe there are several major flaws in their methodologies. We are considering how best to broadcast our assessment, without impinging on our core business, or becoming an expert witness. We think a workshop, similar to the Monday event at CERAWeek could work, where we would present our findings and issue a report. 2. We are also looking into the economic impact of power outages in the West - especially linked to the overall fragile state of the US economy. This would be a collaborative effort with a major economic forecasting firm or university. Again the reults would go to our clients, but could be released to a wider audience, and a workshop might help highlight the release. Please let us know if either topic would be of interest to Enron. We would need to raise funding from various clients to help underwrite the effort , but the work would be CERA's independent research and we would stand fully behind it. Hope all is well. ...Peter .
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