Freezing in the Dark
The days start getting longer today, which for the sun-hungry is good news. For those who have an awareness of the seasons as how they relate to the calendar, it ain’t such good news. Especially for the utilities here in California. They’re supposed to provide gas and electricity — I mean, PG&E stands for Pacific Gas and Electric — but they’re having trouble doing it. What with increased demand and not enough supply, they have been caught in a very unpleasant morass of regulations and deregulation.
What was apparently a well-intentioned effort at deregulation has gone sour. The price of a megawatt of electricity has risen from $31 to more than $1400 in just the past year, while a million BTU’s of natural gas have jumped from $4 to $45. Cold weather didn’t help. Nor did the way the utilities scheduled their maintenance programs which took some plants out of commission at an inopportune time. And rules which required local utilities to sell their power to other utilities around the nation at reduced costs, and then have to buy it back at much higher prices for their own consumers have created a bloated carcass lying rotting on the beach.
The Eminence Gris -- otherwise called governor (Gray Davis) — is not happy at all with the situation. When you raise over $23 million dollars for your re-election during your first 22 months in office, you’re gonna be kinda leery of making significant policy — or even statements — for fear of offending some of your contributors. Since corporations have lots of money but not enough votes, the Guv has had to throw a bone to the public, before they freeze in the dark, which to muddle the metaphor has no teeth in it. Mr. Davis has called for an investigation.
What is most disgusting about the situation is for how long it has been allowed to simmer. The de-reg was started years ago, and yet now for a coupla weeks, California has been on high-degree emergency status, without the resources to provide power to everyone all of the time. They started by asking people to turn off unneeded power drains, like Christmas decorations, which of course was less than a watt in the bucket. So PG&E lost $4.5 billion on extra power costs alone in November, mostly due to soaring wholesale prices, and a prohibition against raising retail rates beyond the obscene. And now, folks, we’re hearing that such rock-solid institutions as Southern California Edison are on the verge of laying off thousands of workers, perhaps on their way to bankruptcy.
I must not have been paying attention somewhere. Have we not figured out a way to supply limitless amounts of electricity to our country? When did we slip into the third world? How do we expect Sillycon Valley — the essential erg in our economic engine — to go about its Internet-ing without power?
Of course, the larger questions — which generally are not asked during times of actual crisis — are why wasn’t this problem foretold to people who would have to do something about it, and who is pocketing the tens of billions of dollars in ridiculous and somehow-unpredicted skyrockets? Or as Deep Throat told the Watergate sleuths, "Follow the money." At the end of the Gray-ing rainbow, you’ll find people who could have prevented the problem, people who were also major political campaign contributors, sitting atop a fetid mountain of greed. But hey, in six months it will be summer.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.