Important PG&E Regulatory Cases
Web Site Information
Click on a topic below to jump to information.
 About
This PG&E Regulatory Cases Area
The Regulation Cases area of the PG&E Internet Web site provides case
documents associated with the regulatory process at both the California and
federal government levels. It is provided as a service to case participants,
media, and customers who need access to case documents.
Most publicly-filed document types in current PG&E cases are available on
this site, such as Pleadings, Testimony, and CPUC documents. Discovery
documents (data requests and responses) are not usually filed documents unless
they are entered into evidence in the course of a case proceeding.
PG&E is a public utility regulated by a number of State of California and
U.S. governmental regulatory bodies. The two principal regulators of PG&E
are the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC).
About Case Names and Case Numbers
Regulatory cases do not usually have formally designated case names, although
the parties to a case may have commonly-used names or abbreviations they use to
refer to them. The formal designator for a case is a case number or docket
number, depending on the venue.
In CPUC cases, the "case number" usually is of the form: x.00-00-000,
where "x" indicates the type of case (A=application to the CPUC; R=CPUC
rulemaking; I=CPUC Investigation), and the numeric digits indicate, from the
left in order, the last two digits of the year of filing (01=2001); the middle
two digits indicate the month of filing (05=May); and the right-hand three
digits indicate a sequence number within the month of filing. For example:
A.01-09-003 is the PG&E 2001 Annual Transition Cost Proceeding. The case
parties, and this site, refer to this case as "ATCP2001".
A given "case" may be composed of one or more case numbers, often because there
are related cases from several different parties (for instance, PG&E,
Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric), each with their
own case number, for different filings that are managed by the CPUC as a single
case. So, case names are helpful for referring to these groups of cases.
This site uses short versions of the case names to allow the user to select the
case of interest for either properties search or full-text search. If the user
only knows the case by its docket/case number, we have provided a
case list of case names matched to case numbers, which may be
helpful to find the name used on this site. The case list also provides a "full
name" in addition to the shorter version "case name".
PG&E
Regulation Web site Document Formats
Most of the documents on the site are posted in Microsoft Office 2000 format,
which is also compatible with Office 97 in file format. Some Word documents may
also be in Word 95 format, which may pose some issues of pagination
consistency, as explained below.
Pagination
Consistency of Electronic Documents
As mentioned in the topic above, preserving exact pagination consistency is one
of the challenges of electronic documents. This problem, as explained below,
has greatly diminished with the use of Microsoft Office 2000.
With the use of the earlier Microsoft Word 6/Word 95 software product to read a
Word document, each PCs line printer software driver determines the layout the
page, at the time the document is printed. Different software drivers and
different printers can produce different page contents. During the 1995-1997
period, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) was a widely used method of
creating a document that would paginate pages the same way on different PCs and
printers, avoiding the Word 95 issues.
With the advent of Microsoft Office 97 and continuing with Office 2000, a
"virtual printer driver" in MS Office does the page layout, producing excellent
consistency of page contents. But on an occasional page, often containing
complicated formatting and footnotes, there may be exceptions to pagination
consistency between PCs.
There are also situations where consistency is preserved when printing Word
97/2000 documents on different PCs, but the Adobe Acrobat PDF derived from them
may have differences in page content from the original Word document.
There may be no current guaranteed way of ensuring that the exact contents of
every line of every page of a printed document is preserved in the electronic
document, unless the printed page is scanned and converted to an electronic
image, in which case the document is then not available to be text-searched by
Internet search engines. PDF files produced from scanned images are also very
large, and take substanial time to download over the Internet.
Office 2000 does produce very acceptable results in terms of page consistency,
file size, and widespread compatibility. It is also very broadly used within
the legal and regulatory community.
Users should refer to offically filed documents if they require an line-exact
citation to a particular line or page number. However, citations to paragraphs
within sections or chapters generally will not produce discrepancy between
electronic and the filed, paper copies of a document.
Given the technical issues involved, PG&E assumes no responsibility for
insuring that the word content of every line or page content of every page of
the electronic documents on this Web site are identical to the officially filed
documents.
Documents
on This Site for Information and Convenience Only
Case documents of various types from various parties to the case, including the
California Public Utilites Commission (CPUC) and other regulators, have been
posted on this Web site for reader convenience, so that the user has ready
access to case documents in one location.
Only those documents formally filed at the CPUC or other regulatory body are
official.
PG&E assumes no responsibility for the correctness of the electronic copies
of documents posted on this site. PG&E cannot ensure that all documents
filed in a case are present on this site, although efforts are made to obtain
all substantative documents.
The documents available are for reader convenience only.
Obtaining
the Free Adobe Acrobat Reader (Version 5)
If you wish to read a document posted on this site that is only available in
"PDF" format, then you will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat
Reader from the Adobe Web site.
Click on the following link to obtain the reader:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
Obtaining
the Free Microsoft " Viewer for Word 97/2000"
If you wish to read a document posted on this site that is in Microsoft Word
97/2000 format, and you do not have a licensed copy of Microsoft Word on your
personal computer, you can download and install a free reader that will allow
you to read (but not modify) Word documents.Click on the following link to obtain the viewer: http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/9798/viewerscvt.aspx
Obtaining
the Free Microsoft "Word 97/2000 Converter for Word 6 and 95 Users"
If you wish to read a document posted on this site that is in Microsoft Word
97/2000 format, and you have Microsoft Word 6.0/Word 95 installed on your
personal computer, you can download and install a free converter that will
allow you to read and modify Word documents. The converter will not necessarily
preserve the formating of new features provided in Office 2000, or preserve the
pagination consistency (found only in documents created with Office 97 or
Office 2000 documents) when they are read by Office 95 with the converter
installed.
Click on the following link to obtain the converter:
http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/9798/viewerscvt.aspx
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