What Energy Crisis?
Thursday, March 29th, 2001I tend to be cynical about government so government ineptitude rarely shocks me. The electricity crisis in California provided an exception. It wasn’t just the up front stupidity that amazed but the refusal to acknowledge it even after the fact. It was bad enough that the original “deregulation” program included such regulatory aspects as freezing retail prices, forcing distributors to pay the highest bid price on the wholesale market, and mandating utility divestiture of power plants; the legislature later added a prohibition on entering into long-term contracts, thus guaranteeing all purchases had to be made in the spot market. What is amazing is not that there was a crisis, but that it took so long to happen.