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To: portage who wrote (103543)	5/20/2001 7:35:35 PM
From: flatsville	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

portage-- This is pretty damning. Reliant's nuts are definitely in the wringer. I knew it was just a matter of time. >>>Unusual phone calls Operators at a San Bernardino County power plant owned by Reliant Energy Inc. say a complex plan to manipulate the California energy market began early last year with a series of unusual telephone calls from the company's headquarters in Houston. According to the accounts of three plant operators, Reliant's operations schedulers on the energy trading floor ordered them to repeatedly decrease, then increase output at the 1,046-megawatt Etiwanda plant. This happened as many as four or five times an hour. Each time the units were ramped down and electricity production fell, plant employees watched on a control room computer screen as spot market energy prices rose. Then came the phone call to ramp the units back up. "They would tell us what to do, and we would do it," said one of the men, who only agreed to speak on condition they not be identified because they fear being fired. "Afterward, we would just sit there and watch the market change." The workers said frequent and large swings in electricity output began at a number of California power plants just as the state's power crisis began in earnest. The workers and state power authorities assert the swings were one of the primary means of gaming the wholesale energy market. "It appears the control rooms are responsive to direction from the trading floors in Houston, rather than the reliability needs of the ISO," said Carl Wood, a commissioner with the utilities commission who is overseeing that agency's investigation into plant outages. "Instead of being responsive to demands for reliability, they're responsive to demands for profitability."<<< It would have been more honest if Reliant had just gone out on the street and held-up rate payers at gun point, don't 'ya think?