The details of "Get Shorty" and "Richochet" and the other scams that were worked on the California grid were not known in great detail until after the end of the crisis, as you say. However, the sense of general fraud was very much in the air from the summer of 2000 onward among those who were paying attention to SDG&E's turmoil.
It is of note, and quite important, that there was a meeting of power marketers, some utility industry execs and a number of Wall Street brokerage house wonks that took place in Aspen, CO in October, 1997. There was a brief mention of this in the trade press, but the white bread corporate media never picked up on this. One of the articles I read in a trade journal was quite revealing. It stated that a senior engineer from PG & E traveled to Aspen from San Francisco and learned what was being proposed at the meeting by the traders. Basically, he understood that the schemes that I mentioned above, and others, were already active concepts in late 1997. This engineer went back to San Francisco in a panic because he understood the potential that this malicious trading had for bankrupting PG&E. Unfortunately for the company, the senior executives at PG&E brushed off the engineers concerns. They were far more interested in the aspect of AB 1890 and other Federal rule changes that were making it possible for PG&E to slip its regulatory noose and found a non-union, non-PUC regulated subsidiary.
So, knowledge of the fact that California was going to be scammed was available to those who were "in the know" from 1997 forward. Clearly the C-PUC must have had some inkling. Cal-ISO clearly did by the summer of 1999 when some clever marketer tested the computers at Cal-ISO and entered bids for 1 Mwh of power at (as I recall) $9,999 for a few seconds, and then came back a short time later and posted a bid of $0.01. The computer accepted both bids. It should have been a huge red flag that the game was on. But no one at Cal-ISO blew the whistle..... and the rest is history. |
