Reisman, sheesh. Didn't this ignoramus follow the story at all ? Is he appealing to the simple minded dittoheads with this type of too stupid to be true attempted emotion provoking anecdote ?
>>Once we see the question in this light, the claims made in the press about the cause of the California blackouts appear truly astounding. What we are
being told is that the power producers were in a position to do extra business -- they allegedly had all the necessary generating capacity
-- but simply refused to do it. We are being told a story which, if applied to restaurants or coffee shops, say, would claim that additional
normal-type, well-behaved customers were coming through their doors, ready to order from their menus, and that even though these
food-service establishments had the all the necessary means of filling the additional customers' orders, they simply refused to do so --
indeed, they refused to do so out of reasons of greed!>>
Comparing power provision and blackouts to attracting more customers into the coffee shop is bizarre. Under the spot market system, the price got jacked to outrageous levels precisely because power was withheld, to make an essential commodity so scarce that the providers knew almost any rate would be paid. Does this clown think the same thing would happen if coffee were withheld at the local restaurant ?!?
As this thread has mentioned ad nauseum, energy is different, as it
-cannot be stored
-doesn't have easy substitutes
-cannot be supplemented by adding new capacity quickly
-is often a matter of life and death, or costs manufacturers millions to restart if shut down even temporarily
As long as the companies that withheld (like El Paso) were still providing a good portion of the energy that did get delivered, the highest spot market price (which applied to all power sold) could actually bring them much greater revenue per unit and in total when they withheld a portion of their power and got paid much more for the remainder that they did deliver at the manipulated jacked up spot price. Duh. Check the demand charts for the Winter 2000-Spring 2001 again. They were normal, and far below capacity. It was the supply that was lowered artificially, except in a few rare instances when the demand actually almost caught up to the (at those times unmanipulated) supply.
(Whump whump. Sound of the dead horse being beaten again).
Hey Bearcat, how come so many of your large deregulated industries with vast networks and a longtime charter for providing near universal service -
Airlines
Energy companies
Telecom,
to name a few,
Are going tits up, or running to the gov't for bankruptcy or bail out help these days ? |
