The California Public Utilities Commission voted Thursday to open talks to return California to a deregulated retail energy market, despite objections from legislative leaders that it is “not within the discretion” of the utilities panel to do so, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The 4-1 vote means the PUC will open hearings, tentatively scheduled to run through 2009, on whether the panel has the legal authority to deregulate the retail energy market, and if so, how to do it and what such a market would look like.

“Frankly, it continues to astound me that we have choice in most everything in our lives but not electricity service,” said the commission’s president, Michael Peevey, who wrote the draft decision to begin studying deregulating the retail energy market, also known as “direct access.”

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