Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 21, 2007 1:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Your speculation is ill-informed by allesfresser
Parent article: LessWatts.org launches

and California went 10-15 years without approving a single additional generating plant.

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 21, 2007 2:09 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (6 responses)

They didn't need any more. Generating plants were deliberately taken off line (for unnecessary "maintenance") in order to create the shortage. Power usage a few months later was up several percent over the rolling blackout level during the engineered shortage, without anyone "approving additional generating plants".

Running Arnold for governor was another ploy: practically his first act was to approve paying the tens of billions of dollars that had been fraudulently billed.

But this is starting to drift off topic.

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 21, 2007 9:30 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

Glad my state doesn't elect fools and crooks to manage the electrical power. Having a private institution manage it is one of the few things we do right around here.. government-wise.

Oh well.

I thank Intel for Powertop.. it's proven very useful.

Before all this effort a very good way to knock a full hour or more off of your battery life was to install Linux over Windows XP.

Now with Vista being such a fat whore of a operating system pretty soon we should start to see power efficiency and battery life as just another reason why Linux is better.

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 21, 2007 15:01 UTC (Fri) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link] (4 responses)

Not sure what you mean by a "private institution" but you appear to be counter-posing it to a democratically controlled (i.e. elected) management. If so you should note that while the rest of California was reeling from blackouts the City of Los Angeles suffered no power outages that affected the rest of the state.

I remember wondering why it was that Santa Monica (which is so contiguous with L.A. that you need a map and street signs to discern the border) had blackouts while we were doing just fine in downtown. It turned out that C. of L.A. had retained a good, old-fashioned, centralized power-generating capacity to serve the needs of its electorate and inertia into buying into the new job-slashing, union-busting paradigm of deregulated, "free market" power resulted in continuous capacity.

Rock on centralized, state-controlled economies!

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 21, 2007 18:35 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

Hrmmm...

I think your looking at the issue in a very very shallow way.

Who in California put those 'eeeviillll corporations' in a position were they could rape and pillage the state? If the people of the state had a choice between rolling power outages or purchasing their power from somewere else then what would of they done? Why didn't the people in charge of the state go through a different corporation when things started turning to shit?

Looks like the people of Texas (not were I am from) were able to happily sell their excess power supply to California while CA was running out of steam. Also if I remember correctly every other state surrounding CA didn't suffer in the same fasion as CA.

Sounds like a governance issue to me. If LA had their own seperate power utilities and didn't have the same problems then that proves it further. Looks like the corporations, being corporations, are a bit of a scape goat. I expect they could of been greedy pirates a-holes, but it's the government of CA that let them get away with it and were the ones that handed over all that money.

It's the same with the RIAA and other corporate bastardisms. Is it the fault of the corporations for going after grandmas? Or is it the fault of the government for providing the laws and the court system that allowed it in the first place? (hint: both) Which party is more accountable to you and the people politically?

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 22, 2007 12:55 UTC (Sat) by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983) [Link]

Then why is it that I remember a famous (or was it an infamous) Texas company was sending excess power into Nevada when it wasn't asked? It was a means to heighten the spot pricing in CA. Free enterprise? OK, was it just luck that more of that corporation's upper management did not die off or go to prison?

Had they been part of the Bush clan, they too might have avoided the consequences of their actions and walked off unscathed. But even the younger could not fully protect his "friends" [that he barely knew]. So unlike his brother, a few paid the legal price for their theft but mostly for their investment schemes and not their criminal intervention into the electricity spot market.

Yes, how can we have forgotten so soon the investment wisdom passed unto us by Texas? Moreover, how could we forget that the Texas elite financed the current regime now holding federal power? How could we so easily forget those gifts?

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 24, 2007 3:24 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

It is absolutely a governance issue. The partial privatisation of California power was a disaster. For more-than-70-years that power was a public utility, these problems did not exist.

When politicized types start yakking up the "efficiency of the private market" as a justification for tinkering with a public utility that has been working fine for decades, ask yourself for whose benefit this change is being sold.

Your speculation is ill-informed

Posted Sep 27, 2007 20:27 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

It should be noted, too, that the privatization occurred with former governor Pete Wilson's personal assistance. They waited until his successor was in office to play their stunt, and then when that successor seemed likely not to pay the bill, they replaced him with a shill.