Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> At 1:51 PM -0500 1/27/01, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> >No, Harvey. California is in a power deficit. It must import power from
> >other regions. There are few, if any, areas of the US that are now in a
> >power surplus. [....]
>
> All true, Mike. I don't dispute anything you said. California does
> have a power deficit such that it must buy power from the outside.
>
> However, we did not see those outside suppliers run out of power. We
> have not seen other states suffer blackouts such that they could no
> longer supply California. When President Bush ordered the power
> turned back on, we did not see an inability to do so.
>
> What we did see is outside suppliers ready to sell power to
> California as soon as they came up with the money. What we did see
> is outside suppliers go ahead and supply the power after President
> Bush ordered them to do so. Now California is trying to figure out
> how to pay for the power now that the utilities are out of money.
>
> Nobody opened up new oil wells or struck new veins of coal to provide
> additional power. What they are opening up are new bank rolls to
> purchase existing power, bankrolls that will probably come from the
> taxpayers eventually. We need to fix the cost recovery pricing for
> electricity and the incomplete deregulation that lead to this mess.
> We do not need to produce more energy to solve California's problem
> of last week. We need new energy sources to solve our over-all
> problems of the future.
What the utilities did was crank up old power generators that had been
shut down due to the excessive pollution they generate. Bush is excusing
them from liability under EPA regs for the pollution, but there is still
more acid rain falling in the northeast because of it, and our local air
quality goes down the tubes because power plants in the midwest are
cranking out the smoke. We have to use MBTE tainted gasoline as a
result, and so our local water supplies get polluted permanently.
California is exporting its pollution, and multiplying it in the
bargain.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:26 MDT