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

To: steve harris who wrote (692336)	7/16/2005 1:05:01 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Electricity: This is Wilson's monster By David Freeman (Wilson really screwed CA and left Davis holding the bag) (Published June 10, 2001) It is embarrassing that former Gov. Pete Wilson is now attempting to absolve himself of blame for the electricity deregulation disaster California is trying to dig itself out of. When Wilson signed the deregulation bill with great fanfare in 1996, he called it "landmark legislation [that] is a major step in our efforts to guarantee lower rates, provide consumer choice and offer reliable service, so no one literally is left in the dark." One thing is for sure: Despite his current who-me? campaign, Wilson was not in the dark about what has turned into the most expensive and dangerous fiasco ever to confront California. He campaigned for deregulation. His appointees on the Public Utilities Commission designed and implemented the plan from beginning to end. The legislation that ultimately passed the Legislature provided exactly the structure Wilson demanded. As recently as April, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "I take credit for having been the driving force to launch deregulation." But now that deregulation has turned into Wilson's -- and the state's -- Frankenstein, the former governor wants to wash his hands of it, saying it didn't turn out the way he envisioned it. Incredibly, Wilson last month told the Associated Press he knew when he signed the legislation it was "obviously flawed," but that he "fully expected that . . . my successor as governor . . . would see and remedy a couple of pretty clear faults." So Wilson now expects Gov. Gray Davis to clean up his mess. In fact, the fatal flaws in Wilson's plan were many. Chief among them was that California's three investor-owned utilities were forced to sell off their fossil-fuel power plants. Most of them were bought by out-of-state energy companies -- several in Texas. Unlike the utilities, whose prices charged to consumers were regulated by the PUC, these so-called "merchant" generators were free to charge any price they could get for wholesale power. Under Wilson's direct order, the utilities also were prohibited from contracting ahead with these firms for power, forcing them to buy power on the wild spot market, with no limit being placed on the price they would have to pay. Deregulation envisioned a world in which the utilities would become mere delivery boys, buying power in a supposedly free market from competing sellers and, in turn, providing that juice to their residential and business customers at a fixed rate high enough to ensure they made a profit. But this free market never came to be. Instead, it has turned out to be a dysfunctional disaster. Under this half free-market, half-regulated hybrid, generators quickly learned how to demand unheard-of prices in what became a sellers' market sacbee.com