8 Jun
2002
8 Jun
'02
10:59 a.m.
That's
called supply & demand.
Supply and demand only set the prices in a perfect competition scheme,
which CA wasn't. CALPEX was a seller's "market". It's always
been that way in CA; just research Hetch-Hetchy and PG&E and
you'll find a century's worth of abuse of the consumers by the
utilities. The people in
left coast refused
all attempts to build different types of power plants, but refused
to limit their growth. No surprise that they ran short on power.
I don't see why they expected the same power companies they had
been opposing all those years to give them cheap power.
Those power companies had consistently shown that they invested
their money with poor judgment and almost always resulting
in cost overruns, greater than expected environmental damage,
costly stranded assets... A lot of it was the companies'
fault, not the consumers'.