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

To: DavesM who wrote (396)	6/6/2001 3:37:20 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 1715

Hi DavesM, Thanks for the intelligent post. Regarding your inquiry: I do find it interesting that 4,000MW were sent out of California, do you know who the purchaser(s) were? The press report I read did not make it clear who the purchasers of the power were. Your surmise is about power being sent back to BPA the best I've seen. There has been a history of energy trading between the BPA and the California utilities that has a decades' long history. Unfortunately, no one was counting on the severe drought in the PNW that we are currently experiencing. And, just sort of piecing together the load factors, the BPA could have well been accepting off-peak power from the California intertie and immediately had a market for the power in the aluminum smelter pots of the Northwest. As far as Sen. Feinstein's comments in the Senate hearing and her interaction with Gov. Davis, I'd have to say I was privy to the first on C-SPAN (and she may well have been merely grandstanding) and haven't a clue as to how she's approaching the state's officers. As I've said all along, transparency is a key missing ingredient in all of this power stew in California. I'm merely feeling like the mushroom (kept in the dark, fed a lot of horse apples) who has had a glimpse of the real world at work. The first Bush appointment to the FERC was sworn on June 5, 2001!! If wholesale price caps couldn't fly on a FERC comprised with all (3) Clinton Appointees, I don't think the addition of two Bush appointees will help. I'm not so sure about that. Hebert's family has been in the awl patch for several generations and he's bent. Jim Woods, OTOH, seems to be something of a straightshooter and he's making sounds like he might just want to shake things up a bit. I'm much more optimistic about him as FERC chairman than I have any right to be. It's a hell of a thing to see a Washington administration lay down for a cabal of blue-eyed sheiks and I see the administration as being clever enough to realize that the campaign contributors can only shake down California for about a hundred bucks for every one dollar of campaign contributions before some editors are gonna raise a real stink about how the system is working. Re: The Governor is right though, municipal utilities seem to have taken advantage of the situation just as the Merchant Power Producers did. DWP made good money on the mess that A.B. 1890 created. LA has stable rates, no blackouts and a profit on the sale of surplus power. Let Davis gripe all he wants. LADWP did not create the enabling legislation, that was done in collusion between the pols and the utility lobbyists. If you want to know who needs reining in, it certainly is misguided for the Governor to attack the munis. After, they aren't profiteering, they're passing on the windfall to the citizens of their municipalities. The guys who need to be soundly castigated are the power marketers who've created one of the most hellishly bizarre Rube Goldberg contraptions ever invented, and amazingly enough, done so with a masterful job of logrolling that offered seemingly every pol in the legislature something for nothing in the unanimous passage of A.B. 1890. Again, masterful on the part of the power marketers who surely paid not much more than a penny for every dollar of windfall profits they are now collecting. A shameful lesson in capitalism run amok. And today the stock market is catching on and thinking that EPG, Williams, Reliant, Mirant, Dynegy and Duke are too clever by half. Maybe the market knows something. Like a tide going out. BWDIK? Ray