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.