California: Shoot Out the Lights

[paulcs]

I doubt you guys outside of California know how bad our power situation is right now. For once, the media is not exaggerating. It's just awful. And San Francisco has been a big target of rolling blackouts.

We were completely duped. Deregulation was to bring competition and lower rates. Instead, we're stuck with two gigantic monopolies, PG&E (aka, Satan) and SoCal Edison, on the verge of bankruptcy. My power bills are perversely high and are about to get worse.

Deregulating our power industry was, quite possibly, the dumbest political act in the history of this state. (And we have no shortage of really really dumb political decisions.) The only people in the state, by far and away the largest and most affluent in the nation, not directly affected by it have public power authorities. Los Angeles has a power surplus.

The President of Paine Weber, no friend to regulation, just appeared of MSNBC and said some industries cannot be deregulated. We're learning this the hard way. Every time a rolling blackout hits, people get stuck in elevators. Businesses close for the day. Perishables perish. Just to bring this on topic, BIOS flashes fail.

By the way, Los Angeles's power and water authority is probably well known to many on this forum. They were the bad guys in the Oscar winning film, Chinatown. They were actually a lot *worse* then they were portrayed in that film. Still, LA has a power surplus, relatively low rates, and no rolling blackouts.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net


[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 19 January 2001).]

[Rags]

Deregulation of the utilities has affected many states including Wyoming. There was a time when if a transformer failed, all that would be needed is a trip down to the local warehouse (which was required by law, and was also required to stock certain core parts). Now, with deregulation, the utilities are able to run like any other business which means that not only do they not have to stock certain parts, but they don't even need a warehouse of parts at all any longer. So instead of waiting 2hrs for power to restore, we have the privelage of waiting for days.

Rags

[Helevitia]

I'm fortunate enough to say that I have not been a victim of these rolling blackouts yet. I only hope that Governor Gray Davis hurries his ass up and does something about it. I'm suprised my lowly small town here in the east bay hasn't been a target yet.

Dave

[paulcs]

That's because a certain bigass town has been bearing the brunt of it.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[paulcs]

Gray Davis declared a state of emergency yesterday, by the way. The lights went out this morning. Again.

Two words keep popping up in my head: eminent domain.

If PG&E doesn't want to touch their cash reserves, let them go bankrupt.

Just to put more perspective on this situation, after deregulation hit, California's private power producers sold off many of their power plants. In the last year, demand throughout the American West, but particularly in California, spiked. Power companies claim they are paying eleven times more for a megawatt than they did at this time last year.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Helevitia]

You know what really pisses me off, PG&E have a parent company that wont bail them out. Also, they bought a lot of crap with our money and they should sell that crap to make up for there losses.

Dave

[Lizzard[MPE]]

WHo is PG&E's parent company?

[ALBPM]

Yesterday I read that Craig Barrett of Intel said they would no longer build FABs in third world countries (California)....LOL

Paul

[The PIT]

Deregulating anything sucks. This has been proven in our country good old UK. Anyone tried catching a train lately? Since Deregulation public transport sucks still our lights stay on so I suppose that works but everything else has got worse.

[paulcs]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Lizzard[MPE]:
WHo is PG&E's parent company?</font>

I believe the Pacific Gas & Electric Company is owned by the PG&E Corporation. The PG&E Corporation also owns the PG&E National Energy Group and Pacific Venture Capital, LLC. PG&E Corporation is quick to point out, right on their home page, that the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, our local power utility, is separate from PG&E National:

The PG&E National Energy Group is not the same company as Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility, and is not regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission. Customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Company do not have to buy products or services from the National Energy Group in order to continue to receive quality regulated services from Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Yessiree! I'm just jumping for joy over the "quality regulated services" I've been receiving as of late.

I'm willing to bet that the parent company and its subsidiaries are shielded to a large extent from Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s current financial woes. The parent company's cash reserves remain untouched. The floundering subsidiary is left to sink or swim.

Again, I say, let it sink.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[SteveC]

Just reading the Register:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
Customers lost power for around an hour in each of the affected areas and more severe outages were only prevented after emergency supplies were brought in from Canada.
</font>

What - they bottled up a load of electricity and shipped it down? Or did someone plug in a huge extension lead and 4-way gang?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/16182.html

Quite a grown up story for the Register...

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Helevitia]

I can't believe that we(California people) are going to bail out the ****ed up Utility companies by releasing $400,000,000 of our own surplus. How lame is that. They ****ed up so we have to bail them out. I wish I could have someone give me money every time I screwed up. Ridiculous!

Dave

[Beezer]

When PG&E declared the rolling outages to begin on Wednesday, we (my place of work in Fremont) calculated that we would be hit at about 3:00pm, so we started preparing by altering our production so that we wouldn't lose wafers in the middle of critical process steps. The outage never occurred, so we lost about 8 hours of productivity for the sake of "insurance".
The next morning we got hit without more than 10 minutes of warning. We're still adding up our losses -- problably in the neighborhood of about $250,000.


[This message has been edited by Beezer (edited 21 January 2001).]