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Pastimes : The California Energy Crisis - Information & Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: WWS who wrote (220)	4/9/2001 8:11:43 PM
From: Tom Simpson	Respond to of 1715

Thanks very much for that link.....it is testimony that has at least a large measure of thought and reason in it; very satisfying to the soul. Still, it doesn't adequately explain the incredibly dramatic price inelasticity we saw last summer-winter in wholesale prices and a close detailed examination of 2000 demand vs. 1999 demand doesn't do it either. Even so....looking forward.....the PUC has us contemplating retail baseline rates somewhere in the neighborhood of 13-15 cents per kwh.....with "energy hogs" (don't you love the way they characterize about 45% of the population :o) paying 15+. Meanwhile the rest of the nation is mostly well under 10 cents. Being as this is Silicon "Investor" one might like to track just where that humongous excess cashflow is actually flowing to. Quite plainly we are seeing a whole bunch of wealth, many billions, rather rapidly being transfered from one set of pockets to another. Even by Gates and Ellison standards this isn't exactly chicken feed. The question is how much of it is and will be long term unsustainable windfall, how much past payables, and how much is real current operating costs. It reminds me of 1973-4, when we had the great oil shock........at the time we (the consuming countries) were all dismayed and astonished at the prospects of transfering an additional 50-60 billion dollars a year in collective wealth to a few Arabs. We had Senators who thought it was downright immoral to charge more than the 25 cents a barrel it cost to pump it out of the ground. We had dire scientific predictions of depleting the worlds oil supply within 20-30 years....(for sure).