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

To: miraje who wrote (1011)	10/29/2001 5:00:59 PM
From: Daniel G. DeBusschere	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1715

I will bite - You need to come back to California and add your voice to the rest of us who like the weather. My quarterly estimated tax payments are only a fraction of what they were in the past and it looks like I am not alone. Apparently, state receipts are running about $1.2 billion a month below plan. There is not much milk left in the capitalist pigs. It's going to get interesting if not downright critical.

To: miraje who wrote (1011)	10/29/2001 6:40:52 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 1715

Hi James, Delightful post. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. You may be in luck, if FERC can pull it off, there may be a super-regional grid coming to a neighborhood near you in the near future. That is, unless you live in Texas, which is exempted for some damn good reason. Hehe. Can you imagine the fun the blue-eyed sheiks envision when NEPool, PJM and the SE grid are one big fish in a barrel. Sueeey! Ya know, I gotta agree with you about AB 1890 not creating de-regulation. That's clear. What isn't so clear to so many observers is how that sausage got ground and who added the seasoning. Whoever was responsible (I use this word advisedly) for terminating long term power contracts and sending the entire state (sans LAWP, and a few other islands of sanity) into the spot market was a genius. Dare I suggest that there was an awful lot of utilily company and power trading association executives pounding the halls of the state capital trying to palm off campaign contributions into the hands of Steve Peace and his ill-mannered ilk? Dare we say that there was some bribery involved in creating the monstrosity called AB 1890? To me, it's an inescapable conclusion. YMMV. :) Cheeerio, Ray (a true running dog libertarian public power toadie, LMAO!!)

To: miraje who wrote (1011)	10/30/2001 12:59:22 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1715

But, to get back on topic, I have no problem with those who deride market approach solutions to the energy problem. I do, however, strongly object to those who classify the CA fiasco as an example of the evils of capitalism and deregulation, as it was anything but that. More like a hodge podge of ill thought out rules and regs that had nothing to do with a truly deregulated electricity market at both the wholesale and retail ends of the system. What rules and regulations? More like the lack of rules and regulations...pure capitalism at its best. If you have a necessary commodity you can name your price and get it. How much is a glass of water worth to a rich man dying of thirst? Whether or not true deregulation would work in this environment is an open question, as it hasn't been tried in this situation, And hopefully it won't be. The experiment exposed the pitfalls of a deregulated electric power market. This ain't the stock market with thousands of buyers and sellers. There are simply too few sellers and they can corner the market. setting it (true dereg) up as a straw dog and then stridently bashing it as the cause of the current mess is being somewhat disingenuous, IMO. First Coke learned its lesson and then SI...and then California. If you have a working system changing it for the sake of change or some kind of text book theory or some kind of youthful idealism or free marketism isn't the way to go. EXPERIMENTING on a grand scale with a century old regulated electric power system that had built the most powerful nation on earth is simply foolish. Failing systems need radical surgery. Working systems need fine tuning. Zeuspaul