Comment Re:it's about time some sanity was introduced (Score 1) 378
I don't know where to begin.
You probably shouldn't have.
In case you haven't noticed, CA has had a problem for years because the price set by the gov't was so low that nobody wanted to produce electricity at that price.
That's quite possibly true, you know. Possibly, anyway. Except that California's power industry has been deregulated since 1998. Please note that we never had trouble getting electricity before then. All of a sudden, though, once we deregulated, this little company called Enron realized that it could "game the system" and start playing games like taking plants offline to raise prices, selling power to themselves to raise prices, withholding power to raise prices, and just plain raising prices because they felt like it. That's what the rolling blackouts were - plants being taken offline for no valid reason other than to engineer a crisis so that Enron and other power companies could sell the state power at prices well in excess of exorbitant.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and California's some $9 billion in the hole. Oddly enough, that $9 billion is just about the amount the state calculates it overpaid the energy barons during that horrible summer. Matter of fact, there's a lawsuit moving through the courts right now to force Enron, Duke, Dynegy, and the other power utils to pay that money back, seeing as it was fraudulently obtained and all that.
My power and water bills have only been going up.
How much you wanna bet they're not NEARLY as high as my power bill was that summer? Deregulation doesn't provide any meaningful consumer protection, as California proved in 2001.
You probably shouldn't have.
In case you haven't noticed, CA has had a problem for years because the price set by the gov't was so low that nobody wanted to produce electricity at that price.
That's quite possibly true, you know. Possibly, anyway. Except that California's power industry has been deregulated since 1998. Please note that we never had trouble getting electricity before then. All of a sudden, though, once we deregulated, this little company called Enron realized that it could "game the system" and start playing games like taking plants offline to raise prices, selling power to themselves to raise prices, withholding power to raise prices, and just plain raising prices because they felt like it. That's what the rolling blackouts were - plants being taken offline for no valid reason other than to engineer a crisis so that Enron and other power companies could sell the state power at prices well in excess of exorbitant.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and California's some $9 billion in the hole. Oddly enough, that $9 billion is just about the amount the state calculates it overpaid the energy barons during that horrible summer. Matter of fact, there's a lawsuit moving through the courts right now to force Enron, Duke, Dynegy, and the other power utils to pay that money back, seeing as it was fraudulently obtained and all that.
My power and water bills have only been going up.
How much you wanna bet they're not NEARLY as high as my power bill was that summer? Deregulation doesn't provide any meaningful consumer protection, as California proved in 2001.
