Sunrise hearings to resume Sept. 4 in San Francisco

By Craig D. Rose, staff writer
San Diego Union-Tribune August 11, 2007

Regulatory hearings into San Diego Gas & Electric's proposal to build the controversial $1.3 billion Sunrise Powerlink - on hold since the utility admitted errors in its application last month - will resume early in September.

Administrative Law Judge Steven Weissman of the California Public Utilities Commission yesterday set Sept. 4 as the date to restart the hearings and laid out a new schedule for future sessions.

Although the first round of hearings was in San Diego, the hearings will resume in San Francisco, site of the PUC headquarters. The new schedule calls for sessions Sept. 4-7, Sept. 26-28 and Oct. 3-4, with the last two days optional.

These hearings involve expert witnesses testifying under oath, subject to cross-examination. SDG&E said yesterday that it welcomed the resumption of the proceedings.

"We're glad to see the judge wants to move this process forward," said Jennifer Briscoe, a spokeswoman for SDG&E. "We're ready to go back to work and and get this line built."

As proposed by the local utility, Sunrise would begin in Imperial County, cross Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and then run across a host of North County communities.

SDG&E says the 150-mile transmission line needs to be in service by 2010 in order to guarantee electricity reliability and give the utility access to renewable energy projects it expects will be developed in Imperial County.

Supported by business and organized labor groups, the line is opposed by community, environmental and consumer organizations.

The hearings went off track July 18, when SDG&E said it needed to correct errors in its filing for the project.

The utility subsequently revised its estimate of what it says Sunrise will save utility customers, dropping the projected savings to $129 million per year, compared with an initial savings estimate of nearly $450 million annually.

With the new estimates, opposition parties requested time to study the utility's revised case for the project.

But SDG&E's proposal ran into a second problem when Dian Grueneich, the PUC commissioner assigned to the case, said the utility had introduced new elements into its case for Sunrise, including the possibility of expanding the proposed powerline.

Considering those changes would result in at least a five-month delay in completing the environment review of the project, Grueneich ruled on July 24. That would make it impossible for Sunrise to be built by 2010, she said.

SDG&E denies its actions caused the environmental review delay and said yesterday that it was still studying its options with regard to Grueneich's ruling.

In her ruling, Grueneich indicated that there was little urgency in getting the project in place, noting that the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the state's electric grid and is a Sunrise supporter, had filed testimony saying it would be cheaper for ratepayers if the project were delayed until at least 2013.

Subsequent to that ruling, the ISO sent a letter to the commissioner saying it still had concerns about regional electric reliability if the line isn't built by 2010 and asserting that under certain inflation scenarios, it might be cheaper for ratepayers for it to be built by 2010.

Efforts yesterday to reach Grueneich for comment on the ISO letter were unsuccessful.

SDG&E has said it can meet the region's electric reliability requirements in 2010 by adding small peaking power plants. But Briscoe, the utility spokeswoman, said yesterday that without the line in place at that time, SDG&E would lose access to enough cost-effective renewable energy to meet a state mandate requiring it to derive 20 percent of its power from renewables by 2010.

Jonathan Heller, a spokesman for a group called the Community Alliance for the Sunrise Powerlink, said the ISO's letter reinforces the need for moving quickly on the project.

"Here you have the agency responsible for keeping the lights on saying to the PUC that Sunrise is so critical it needs to go forward with all due haste," said Heller, whose alliance includes SDG&E, as well as business and labor groups.

Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, said the ISO was grasping at straws to bolster the project and had selected an unlikely scenario to support the need for Sunrise by 2010.

"They added a 9 percent inflation rate scenario when the other numbers they used for the project didn't work," Shames said.