California Power Failure

----- Forwarded by Maureen McVicker/NA/Enron on 01/12/2001 02:08 PM -----

Karen Denne
01/12/2001 09:45 AM

To: Jeff Dasovich/NA/Enron@Enron, Susan J Mara/NA/Enron@ENRON, Sandra
McCubbin/NA/Enron@Enron, Paul Kaufman/PDX/ECT@ECT, Linda
Robertson/NA/Enron@ENRON, Peggy Mahoney/HOU/EES@EES, Maureen
McVicker/NA/Enron@Enron
cc: Steven J Kean/NA/Enron@Enron, Richard Shapiro/NA/Enron@Enron, James D
Steffes/NA/Enron@Enron
Subject: California Power Failure

Please see attached editorial, which ran in yesterday's New York Times and is
in today's Houston Chronicle. We are distributing to all key media who have
been covering California energy.

SF team -- Please distribute to all legislators, trade and industry
organizations, etc.
Linda -- Please forward to Quinn Gillespie to distribute in Washington.
Maureen -- Please distribute to the internal GA team.

Thanks.
kd

Editorial Desk; Section A
Essay
California Power Failure
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

01/11/2001
The New York Times
Page 31, Column 1
c. 2001 New York Times Company

LOS ANGELES -- In the past decade, California has become the most Democratic
state in the nation. It has a Democratic governor, two liberal Democratic
senators, and both houses of its legislature are firmly in Democratic hands.
Not for nothing is it called the Left Coast.
Then why, Californians now ask themselves, is their state the most troubled
in the nation? Bad enough that Hollywood's writers are preparing to strike;
worse that speculators in Silicon Valley start-ups are watching their stack
of chips dwindle; worst of all is the unforeseen electricity shock that is
making the state's hair stand on end.
The price of electricity is soaring, yet the big electric utilities are
threatened by bankruptcy. Who's to blame?
The chosen villain: deregulation. As soon as cruel market forces were allowed
to work, cry liberal voices, those heartless capitalists drove up prices.
Bring back the cool, calm days of inefficient monopolies under government
control.
But in fact, the first villain is botched deregulation -- not as bad as in
Russia, but 'tis enough, 'twill do.
California's politicians deregulated halfway, which is the worst way:
wholesale prices were freed from controls, but retail prices were not.
Consumers remained seemingly protected, but the utility companies -- which
foolishly thought wholesale prices would go down forever -- were enabled to
buy on the spot market. Legislators believing they were protecting consumers
forbade long-term contracts, which are hedges against sudden price
fluctuations.
This halfway dereg ran smack into the inexorable law of supply and demand.
The good times of the 90's sharply increased demand for electric power. But
all sorts of obstacles were put in the way of increasing the supply of that
power.
Result: upward pressure on prices, calls for rationing, utilities going
broke, government intervention that frightens off private investment, and the
danger of an economic Big One in the state responsible for 13 percent of the
nation's product.
The unspoken issue in this bastion of liberalism is ''nimby'' -- the real
villain in the current supply crisis, that says ''not in my backyard'' to
power plants. In San Jose, epicenter of the computer industry's drain on
electric power, New Economy voters recently rejected a new power facility
that offended their aesthetic sensibilities. Red tape and purple rhetoric are
the reasons no major power station has been built in California in 10 years.
Contrary to popular belief, electricity does not come from the socket in the
wall. The steady flow of low-cost power comes from factories that convert
energy from other sources into the stuff that makes toasters pop,
air-conditioners wheeze and computers beep. Unless energy is dug up and
produced in real places and transmitted through real lines, nothing comes out
of the wall.
Environmentalists recoil in horror at suggestions of nuclear power, now a
safe and clean source of electricity, or the use of cleaned-up coal to lower
the price of natural gas that generates it. Reducing pollution sensibly is
laudable, but clean-air extremists become local heroes without telling
constituents the danger of loss of Intel jobs and cheap electricity's
household convenience.
The answer is not re-regulation, nor more halfwayism, nor federal bailout.
When Gov. Gray Davis of California raced to Washington, D.C., to ask for
wholesale price controls, he found Bill Clinton too busy carving up Jerusalem
to mediate; Clinton-appointed federal energy bureaucrats offer only
palliatives, with photo op to follow.
Davis's panicked proposal to build state-owned plants (in Nevada? On the
moon?) and his threat to seize the assets of ''price gougers'' may please
some new breed of dot-communists. But such populist pap destroys private
incentive to invest and is hardly the path for a presidential hopeful
professing to be a centrist.
After short-term action to alleviate hardship caused by past and present
political-industrial blindness, our biggest state should avoid regressing
into more stultifying regulation and instead get out of the way of
stimulating supply.
Why do I sound like a reformed drunk on this? Because I wrote the Nixon
speech imposing wage and price controls. They never work in peacetime. Never.

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