Or you can shovel coal into a broiler, after you build one for me and supply the coal.
Or you can just leave my nuclear plants alone so that everybody can have electricity.

That bit about Enron? Are you joking?

FAIL

1. The so-called market manipulation was mainly by public utilities such as LA DWP, City of Pasadena, SMUD, etc. not private outside energy suppliers. Example: City of Pasadena made a cool $100 million gaming the crisis.

2. Many of the so-called gaming maneuvers by Enron and other energy providers were actually attempts to curtail grid congestion and thus LOWER prices and avert brownouts and blackouts.

3. The probabilities of phasing out nuke power plants along the California coast are small because the more green power mandated by the state (now 33% mandated) the more backup power will be required because wind and solar power cut be short circuited by nature (clouds or air pressure change) in a moment. One of the likely sources of such instantaneous back up power is California’s nuke plants.

4. The 2001 Energy Crisis was not caused by deregulation but by overregulation and a confluence of events that was later called a “perfect storm.” In 1996 the Clinton-led EPA mandated California clean up smog by 2001 or face cut off of Federal funds. No coincidence that California’s energy crisis was in 2001 after old polluting power plants were forced into mothballing.

5. There was not one, but two energy crises in 2001. The first was a Republican oriented policy of deregulation hoping to cut smog by outsourcing power from other states that would create a competitive market that would also lower prices at the same time. This failed for a variety of reasons but mainly because a new Democratic legislature and Governor in 2001 pulled the plug on it so that Republican Texas wouldn’t be making money on California.

The second crisis was price controls that were put into place after deregulation was scuttled. Price controls were intended to induce a pricing fever (bubble) in order to pay off the $42 billion in unpaid bonds on old power plants mothballed due to EPA mandates. This is what most of us experienced as the “energy crisis” with rolling brownouts and blackouts and skyrocketing prices. It was totally manipulated by the state including manipulating the media that Enron was to blame.

6. The $42 billion in unpaid debts on mothballed power plants was rolled into a mega-bond in 2003 and is due to be paid off in 2012. AB 32 – Global Warming Solutions Act – kicks in in 2012 to capture all this market for green power at helfty price increases.

7. The claims of environmentalists of moral and environmental superiority of green power is specious. Wind and solar power are not only unpredictable and require duplicate back up, but they don’t clean the air either. Wind and solar farms do not replace out of state coal power plants and because they are located in remote desert areas do not reduce air pollution in urban air basins (smog traps).

8. There presently is a mandate from the State Water Resources Board to eliminate ocean water cooling by nuke and conventional power plants along the coastline at considerable expense ($2 billion?). The alternative is either air cooled systems or importing water from hundreds of miles away to bring all the way to the coastal power plants at a cost of mega billions. The whole intent of this is to render nuke power uncompetitive in the market and thus green power can compete with it.

9. Oil and gas fracking is a wild card and may result in a future energy crisis that would make the 2001 crisis look like a pimple. The only way that California can hold off this crisis is to erect blockades and barriers to competition from outside cheap energy. But markets have an uncanny way of influencing prices. It would be like trying to be self sufficient as to oil but only to find that Saudi Arabia still controls the worldwide price of oil.

Expect more soon on the above from this writer.
Best regards,
Wayne Lusvardi