Today was a notable, if not a seminal, day of hearings. The morning began with an excellent cross-exam of Linda Brown by RPCC attorney Harvey Payne in which he elicited from Brown how the company had withheld important data and failed to conduct important modelling runs that might have shown how Sunrise caused outages in the SDG&E system. Brown repeatedly contradicted herself or misstated facts. Ultimately, Mr. Payne was able to effectively show that the last extension of the Sunrise line into Penasquitos was more expensive than an alternative offered by RPCC.

The afternoon was largely devoted to questions posed by Adminstrative Law Judge Weissman who attempted to cut through Brown's evasions and get to the core of many of the basic issues in the case. He effectively pointed out the logical inconsistency with the Commission's request for alternatives to Sunrise and SDG&E's insistance that any alternatives be subjected to lengthy studies that could not be performed during the duration of the case. He cut to the chase on the process that SDG&E used to develop Sunrise and the company's conviction that it had to build not only Sunrise but also a northern link into the Edison system at a future date. His questioning is going to prove to be requiredl reading for anyone who is interested in the details of this case.

Brown finally concluded today. The next set of SDG&E witnesses will be dealing with many of the details that Brown could not or would not answer. She was an important witness for SDG&E and her three day appearance may turn out to fatally undercut SDG&E's case for the power line. But, of course, we won't know for sure for many months (or years) from now.