David Thomas: “let me say, first of all, I am happy we are moving forward with this amendment. This, of course, is a total effort to…”

“let me say, first of all, I am happy we are moving forward with this amendment. This, of course, is a total effort to take last year's activities with relation to the electric title in the Energy bill and to redo it. Actually, we have been through this same argument before and we came up with a different recommendation. What we are seeking to do is cause our electric industry to be in a more modern status; to make changes in law and policy that reflect changes that have taken place and are taking place now in the energy industry. What we are trying to do here is deal with the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act of 1935. We have, of course, a Federal policy that has been in place for almost 65 years. The Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act is an outdated statute that imposes barriers to competition and discourages investment in transmission. This is key. What we are seeking to do here is to modernize this system so that because of the changes that have already taken place, for instance, 30 percent now the power being generated by merchant generators who do not do their distribution, then there has to be an opportunity to have transmission lines. The investment in those is very high, and we have to make some changes in terms of how capital is created to be able to do that. PUHCA limits geographic and product diversification and imposes many burdensome filing requirements.”