Preliminaries; contents; Introduction; The Feds vs. the Californians; The Theories that Shaped the California Plan; Lobbyists Define the Shape of the Plan; Steve Peace-a dedicated worker; Politics and the Plan; Stranded Costs Would Always Be the Problem; The Mechanics Under the CPX and the ISO; The Marketing Blitz That Never Quite Happened; All the Tricky Bonds; The Short Delay That Spoke Volumes; Consumers Didn't Care ... and Activists Didn't Think Clearly; Investors Feel the Effects; The Munis; NIMBY Politics Seal the Plan's Fate; The Flashpoints of Electricity Pricing
What the Generators Were Doing ... and HowEnron; The Blackouts; Did Energy Companies Conspire to Scam the People?; Using Bankruptcy as a Bargaining Tool; Gray Davis and the Bail-Out; Cleaning Up the Mess; Conclusion; Index
Summary
California's energy deregulation drama made headlines for most of 2001and 2002. It has proven to be one of the biggest regulatory, political and public policy mistakes in the last hundred years of the American economy. The plan to deregulate California's electricity markets partially worked a strange alchemy on politics and business. The results cast a harsh light on: partisans who didn't fully understand their ideology; consumers who wanted cheap energy but no power plants in their neighborhoods; political compromises that ended up being far worse than extreme positions; and corporations ready to exploit new rules for what they thought was their immediate gain. This book explains what happened in the California energy crisis, why it happened and who was to blame
