POWER POINTS: Generators Must Prove Report Wrong, Or Die
By MARK GOLDEN and JESSICA BERTHOLD
online.wsj.com
A Dow Jones Newswires Column
NEW YORK -- Well, at least the gloves are off.
<<Thanks to a most serious accusation by the California Public Utilities Commission on Tuesday, we should find out over the next couple of weeks whether independent power producers indeed created the California electricity crisis, or whether the causes had their roots in supply and demand, despite two years of accusations from the administration of Gov. Gray Davis.>>
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<<On Tuesday, the generating companies had to ask the media for copies of the report so that they could respond. Appendices to the report, which supposedly provide company-specific detail, have yet to be released.
"If you have information that is damning, that puts your enemy in a hole, you show it," Ackerman said. "They're not showing anything but the results. Let people look at it, subject it to verification, and if it stands the test of time, that will bear out."
In fact, two of the companies blasted by the commission get a nearly clean bill of health in the report, even though Lynch and her staff didn't say so publicly. Mirant Corp. (MIR) looks relatively saint-like when it comes to generating all available power, and Williams Cos. (WMB) looks pretty good, too. Almost all of the power those companies didn't generate according to examples in the report was due to outages.
But, because the investigation clearly had an agenda beyond finding out the truth, Lynch's presentation folded unit outages back in when she talked about these two companies, even though the findings claimed to be about capacity that was available but unused.>>
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A lot more at the link. IMHO CPUC report is mostly if not all politically motivated crapola.
Good luck all. Winkman |
