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To: Joe Lyddon who wrote (52154)	6/7/2001 12:44:34 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Respond to of 57584

Joe, of course many industrial customers can monitor peak demand, and the power company can charge higher rates for peak usage. This often happens, in addition to being able to shut down certain operations at peak periods. In general, industrial and some commercial users are able to do more for avoiding peak usage and improving the conservation of energy than residential customers (ironically). Residential customers have a basic problem in that their utility bills show monthly use, not hourly or daily. What's more, many residential customers have a budgeted billing where they pay an average fee every month for the whole year. This may help the consumer pay bills, but it means that the use of price to control excess demand is ineffective. Because residential use generally is not sufficiently price sensitive, the way is opened for other technologies, such as solar photovoltaic rooftop units that tend to deliver most of their power during peak periods. Furthermore, say a suburban user is away from home working on a very hot weekday afternoon, when peak power demand tends to be highest. A solar unit tied into the grid will probably supply MORE power than is needed by the residential owner at that time, allowing the remainder to be added to the available power on the grid. This saves money for the residential user and also helps to reduce peak demand--and eventually to reduce AVERAGE prices paid by all users. Art

To: Joe Lyddon who wrote (52154)	6/7/2001 1:12:07 PM
From: Kanetsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57584

This market continues to baffle me, nothing new there. Here I thought traditional value stocks would outperform the overpriced naz stocks. BRCM is a great example, all they say is that cancellations are slowing, nothing about new orders, and no sign of when they will even make a profit, and the stock goes up 10%. Just a good old fashioned short squeeze, so the institutions can bail out a little higher. At the moment the stronger hands want it to go higher, so it will. All the bad news is out and it's time to buy they are saying, valuations be damned. Too risky to go in to INTC conference call short, so I doubt the market will sell-off much more. Apparently, prices are far enough off their highs that they no longer seem expensive, hence the reaction to any news is good. Going cash on the close, hope things will then get a little higher so I can reload my shorts. I sense the real short squeeze has yet to come. The nazdaq is more like a casino than an investment vehicle. Probably because so many hedge funds are trading it on black box systems using leverage. Tons of long/short equity traders flooding the market lately, and they always use a lot of leverage. Not to mention they are raising money to trade by the boatloads as traditional buy and hold strategies become suspect. Hence, psychology will outweigh fundamentals because the market always seem to be looking 6 months ahead, even though it can't see that far. On the other hand, that triple top is very interesting...it always seems darkest before the dawn for shorts or longs. As for California's energy crisis, any state that elects Barbara Boxer to represent it deserves what it gets. The only victims are the ones who live here and didn't vote for all the NIMBY bozos the fruit and nut crowd elected. (maybe I'm a bit partisan)

To: Joe Lyddon who wrote (52154)	6/7/2001 5:22:13 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57584

We all know that when California's Legislature passed the ill-conceived energy deregulation bill in 1996, the stated goal was to reduce electricity prices over time by increasing competition among suppliers. Obviously, it didn't turn out that way. So far, most observers have been casting blame for the current predicament on the provisions of the law that allowed the utilities to selectively divest themselves of power plants without any assurance they could buy power back from those plants at reasonable prices. But there was another, lesser-known part of the legislation that had at least an equally adverse impact. The final bill also included a provision that created a special new tax levied on any business that wanted to generate their own power. The politicians hoped to disguise the new tax by not calling it a tax. Instead, they opted for a more benign-sounding Orwellian phrase, calling it a Competitive Transition Charge, or CTC. The CTC was imposed on any business in the state that took itself off the power grid after 1995 by buying its own power-generating equipment. At the time, that mostly meant natural gas-powered co-generation units that can supply a single building, business or small community with electricity and heat. But it also applied to any other power-generating equipment. "The CTC is not a tax," one legislative staffer told me with a perfectly straight face at the time. "It's a fee to create competition." The rationale for the CTC was that the monopoly utilities had built power plants with the expectation of paying them off over many years with the help of a locked-in customer base. But when customers, particularly big customers, wanted to flee to other providers or use their own generators, the utilities convinced the Legislature something had to be done to make sure they would be able to pay off the power-plant building expenses they had already incurred. The final legislation, which included the CTC, also allowed the largest consumers of electricity to negotiate preferred rates with the utilities while consumers and small businesses were supposed to get frozen rates at first and then scheduled mandatory rate decreases. In truth, the CTC may be the biggest single blunder in the entire deregulation process because of the way it forestalled decentralized competition during a period when centralized power generators were allowed to jack up prices. Message 15382059 (have to goto archives to get the full article: sfgate.com