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WASHINGTON — President Bush will nominate Curt Hebert, who has argued against federal involvement in the California electricity crisis, as chairman of the agency that regulates wholesale power markets. 

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced the selection as senior administration officials, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, met at the White House to discuss the California power situation. 

Hebert, the former state utility regulator in Mississippi, is the only Republican on the current five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which he will head. 

A close friend of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., Hebert has argued forcefully in recent weeks against FERC imposing price controls on wholesale electricity sales into California. 

When FERC in mid-December took modest steps to help California cope with its surging electricity prices, Hebert agreed with the measures, but said he would rather have favored eliminating all price controls. 

In an interview last week, Bush also expressed his opposition to imposing price controls – in the form of FERC-mandated price caps on wholesale power – on the California market, saying they would be counterproductive. 

California Gov. Gray Davis and the state’s cash-strapped utilities have urged FERC to intervene in the wholesale market, arguing that power generating companies were price gouging. FERC has so far rejected the plea. 

Hebert was described by power industry officials as a free-market advocate when it comes to the electricity industry and has favored leaving decisions on electricity deregulation to states instead of the federal government. 

Hebert will replace William Massey, a Democrat, who was elevated to the chairmanship by President Clinton on Jan. 19, after James Hoecker, another Clinton appointee, unexpectedly resigned. 

Hebert, 38, a former Mississippi state legislator and member of the state Public Service Commission, joined FERC in November 1997. His current term expires in 2004. 

He comes from Pascagoula, Miss., as does Lott. 

With Hoecker’s resignation there remain two vacancies on the commission, which has been at the center of both the natural gas and electricity industry’s shift to deregulation in recent years. 

It was FERC that issued rules that opened the nation’s electric power grid to competition in the mid-1990s, prompting many states — led by efforts in California — to embrace electricity industry deregulation amid promises it would lead to lower consumer prices because of competition. In most cases, deregulation has not led to substantial savings for consumers. 

In California, where the effort has been acknowledged as a failure, power prices have soared amid shortages that have produced rolling blackouts in recent days and threatened two of the state’s major investor-owned utilities with bankruptcy.