Commissioner
Upendra Chivukula is a Commissioner at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
The PUF team was warmly welcomed by those energy stalwarts charged with drafting and implementing Governor Phil Murphy's Energy Master Plan at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
It's serious work, but it's fun too, as you will hear Staff attest. And the New Jersey BPU is big, with some two hundred and twenty-five Staff, because in 2003 it established the Office of Clean Energy to help administer its programs. Talk about forward thinking.
PUF: Talk about holding elected office and what that means for your work here at the Board.
Commissioner Chivukula: I got elected in 1997 to the local office as a councilman, and a mayor, and then I became a legislator in 2001. In 2001 I got elected, and 2002 I started. I spent almost thirteen years as a legislator.
During my tenure, I became the chairman of the Assembly Telecom and Utilities Committee, where I was able to oversee telecom policy, cable television policy, and then electricity. Not so much natural gas, but anything that pertains to the generation of electricity. I was overseeing that.