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

To: ThirdEye who wrote (323642)	11/27/2002 2:03:22 AM
From: DavesM	Respond to of 769670

You are right, there was diversion of power out of state. Though I think some of the diversion was via an agreement that CA had w/the BPA. The BPA would sell power to CA, and CA was obligated to sell just as much power back. But now it seems that Enron also bought power, shipped it north, than sold it back to CA (to get around FERC price caps). re:"The so-called maintenance of as many as 17 power plants in SoCal, taking them offline at crucial periods of rising demand might also have contributed to the blackouts, but they wouldn't have happened without Enron" This is one of the items regarding the crisis, that I never totally understood. See, shutting down plants would lower supply, and result in power emergencies declared (and possibly blackouts). But if an emergency were declared, FERC price caps (from Dec 2000 to June 2001, there was a soft cap of ~$150/mwhr- afterwards there was a $90 hard cap) could kick in limiting the price that IPPs could charge CA. Further, if these plants were offline, they couldn't sell power out of state either - bypassing the soft price caps (note by June 2001, the caps were for the entire region).