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New WashPost story on Califonia electricity problems.
[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37586-2001Aug20.html|The $3,880 Megawatt-Hour - How Supply, Demand and Maybe 'Market Power' Inflated a $273 Commodity]

It's a short, but good read. It seems pretty balanced too. Lots of problems with the system out there...

Cheers,
Scott.
New electricity like water, sewer, gasoline and heating oil
should either be government regulated or co-op adventured. Like treasury bonds with a fixed but guarrantied return life(style) sustaining commodities cannot be left to the unregulated market. The Money supply is another example. Co-ops seem a good way to go, consumers own the power plants co-operatively by market and will issue bonds to assure supply that will guarranty rates to repay the bonds. Any defaults and the government steps in, manages it for them until chapter 11 has been resolved. Gas and heating oil dont lends themselves redily to co-ops so regulation of rates over private companies is essential. If you guarranty a 10% return on investments and make sure the refineries are up to snuff, sufficient capacity and long term supply contacts are in place safe money will be attractive there. The spot market of oil will always fluctuate so we must secure an adequate supply as much of that US controlled. R&D is not welfare to energy companies. Any and all R&D must be deductable but they must be forced to publish results so stuff isnt hidden because of inroads on traditional technologies.
Should we deregulate water so companies sell raw sewage to slumlords instead of clean drinkable water? of course not electricity and the others are the same.
thanx,
bill
Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp. We are raising a nation of slaves.
Chuck Palahniuk
New Re: WashPost story on Califonia electricity problems.
Catchy headline, but like an article in one of those supermarket rags, nothing behind it. Here are the major flaws
1) The so called "fair price" for a MegaWatt Hour (MWH) ignores the cost of the pollution credits the utility had to use to fire up the old plant. They typically run it only during peak demand, summer, times using their accrued pollution credits to cover the demand spike. This approach is less costly than building a new plant.

If they start up the old plant out of schedule using up the pollution credits, they could be forced to fire it up again to meet the peak demand in the summer. The company would then be forced to pay pollution fines or purchase credits. This added risk burden deserves compensation in the form of higher charges per MWH.

If the cost of going dark dwarfs the $38K MWH as the article implies, why the concern about the price? Answer, because the California style deregulation perverts the marketplace by artificially shielding the power consumer from the true cost of the product.
2) The article mentions that there have been 4 times as many planned and unplanned outages as last year. So what? Power plant planned outages are planned in many cases more than a year in advance due to the logistics involved and the maintenance schedules for the equipment. As for unplanned outages, they hardly follow a normal year-to-year distribution.

Great headline, but not much more.
     WashPost story on Califonia electricity problems. - (Another Scott) - (2)
         electricity like water, sewer, gasoline and heating oil - (boxley)
         Re: WashPost story on Califonia electricity problems. - (Decco Dave)

My brain hurts thinking about how you know all of that.
54 ms