This is the interchange from Green Tech Media. I'm Stephen Lacy, Green Tech Media's editor-in-chief

alongside our senior vice president, Shale Khan. Hey Shale.

Hey, Stephen.

We have a pretty newsy interview this week. I'd like to think that we're always kind of creating news around here, but this one is particularly noteworthy. You got on the line with Michael Picker, who is the president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

What did you guys talk about?

So Commissioner Picker is about to kind of open up a conversation that could be really important for the future of

electricity in California and potentially if it goes really well it could be important

for the future of electricity in the entire country.

Basically in short, he's planning to introduce a series of meetings that could lead to a proposal

to open up some version of competitive retail choice for

electricity in California. Now brief history lesson here. We used to have

fully regulated, fully vertically integrated utilities in the US.

We went through a wave of deregulation that was proceeding through the 90s into 2000, 2001 that involved both deregulation of generation, meaning generation

assets didn't have to be owned just by utilities, but also deregulation of retail,

in other words allowing some customers to select retail

electricity suppliers who are not their incumbent utility.

That basically came to a screeching halt in 2001 with the Enron scandal and since then we haven't really seen

retail electricity choice introduced in pretty much any new state.

So we have like 14 states now depending on how you define it that have some version of retail choice

California is not among them and Commissioner Picker is looking at sort of what's happening in

California anyway all these ways that we've talked about many times on this podcast in which

customers of various stripes, be they residential, commercial, or communities are selecting how to manage or how to

...