Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the Consumer Watchdog .pdf. I found that there appears to be a whole lot of truth to what they say. In distinction, I watched the presentation of a couple of panels of the Energy Conference being presented before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington D.C. yesterday and today and found that the presentations of the CEO of Duke Energy, the Chairman of the Southern Companies and the Executive VP of Enron were to a large extent disingenuous and facile. They were complaining about the vast levels of disinformation, of which I'm certain they would place the consumerwatchdog.com pdf. Yet, these executives never even came close to describing the facts of the California situation, nor did they expose their hand, as far as what new sort of initiatives they hoped to take. Only that they sought regulatory relief and demanded that new regulatory regimes be set in stone. (IMHO, conveniently providing much easier static targets for gaming the system.) We used to talk of the blue eyed sheiks of Calgary, but I see they live in Charlotte, Atlanta and Houston as well.
While I understand that you have an interest in private power due to your desire to profit from your shares in certain companies in the power generation industry, I am curious as to what level of destruction of the California economy you are willing to endure in order to gain a pittance in your stock gambling accounts as the agricultural, manufacturing, high tech and service industries in your state are damaged, if not in part destroyed, for the sake of one sector's temporary gain?
In reading the consumerwatchdog .pdf, I found it is indeed prophetic, in a way that the author must be surprised by the rapidity of the denoument, that the rolling blackouts are being used as a tool to soften the political system toward the will of the power companies. Having read about market corners and squeezes from the past antics of Wall Street operators, it is indeed breathtaking to see a squeeze up close and personal. <g>
On another note, we in the PNW are of course in our own kind of hell. Seems that in the summer of 2000, the BPA, in all its wisdom, decided to write long term (i.e. 10 years) contracts for 11,000 Mw of committed power sales. Seemingly, not an unreasonable figure, until I was recently informed at our local 'lectic co-op meeting that the BPA only has about 8,000 Mw of generating capacity. What's wrong with this picture? <w>
Best, Ray :) |
