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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (259535)	5/29/2002 7:53:10 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

You make two points: I think you are quoting Dick out of context on ANWR. As far as there being a shortage, ISO agrees with Cheney. And an article further describing the woeful deregulation strategy. No matter how you spin it, this is a government disaster. -- Jim McIntosh, director of grid operations for the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of power across the state, said the problems that day initially were caused by record temperatures, which caused demand for power to soar. On top of that, he said, several key Bay Area electricity plants, which normally power homes and businesses, failed. That forced state officials to attempt to pump more power into the Bay Area from other sources. But despite the CBS report's contention, he added, there was no problem getting power from Southern California to Northern California that day. The real problem, he said, was an inability to ship it the final few miles to Bay Area customers, because some transmission lines here couldn't carry that much juice. Enron traders ``may have been playing those games that they referred to in this article and made money'' on their deals, ``but it had nothing to do with grid reliability'' in Northern California on June 14, 2000, McIntosh said. siliconvalley.com Geoffrey Brown, a Davis appointee to the state Public Utilities Commission, offered an even stronger indictment of the old regulatory scheme. "Rate setting by government people, as opposed to market forces, is a joke," said Brown. "I came to the PUC without any knowledge of utilities and I didn't get a lot of scrutiny in the Senate," he said. Despite that, he added, "my confirmation was a cakewalk." Brown criticized as "simply pathetic" the state Department of Water Resources negotiations that produced a $43 billion portfolio of long-term power contracts. State negotiators were "amateurish and they were taken to the cleaners," he said. Robert Laurie, a Republican member of the state Energy Commission, joined that chorus, criticizing the state's "regulatory chaos." bayarea.com