{"id":262098,"date":"2023-06-14T21:27:41","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T19:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=262098"},"modified":"2023-06-14T21:27:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T19:27:44","slug":"recent-science-hoaxes-reruns-of-2001-california-energy-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=262098","title":{"rendered":"Recent Science Hoaxes Reruns of 2001 California Energy Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wayne Lusvardi<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has anyone called for a separation of media from government?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going into the winter of 2001, you could not imagine the political and financial predicament that California was in if you had to depend on mass media about the California Energy Crisis.  I formed a task force for the largest urban water district in California at that time and came to understand the crisis from firsthand information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2002 Enron was accused of spiking electricity prices in California by taking power plants offline at the peak of the crisis.  But my research found it did so, not to create a shortfall to game the market (as depicted in the book The Smartest Guys in the Room<\/a> and movie<\/a> 2005) but to avoid conveying power when the grid was congested, which lowered prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cal Energy Crisis was really a financing crisis, as California was not running out of electricity but clean air in 2001.  Moreover, the management of the crisis became a template for current public health and environmental science hoaxes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1996, Clinton federal EPA had ordered California to reduce air pollution in its smog traps by 2001 or it would cut off federal funds. The fastest way to do this was to mothball nineteen polluting coal and diesel-fueled power plants owned by three regulated private utilities: San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), So. Cal. Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas and Electric (SDG&E). These \u201cdirty\u201d power plants were replaced with less-polluting natural gas power plants<\/a> built and operated by merchant energy producers not utilities. Moreover, this decentralization by so-called deregulation undercut the Rate Base<\/a> and economy of larger scale of regulated utilities resulting in higher prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, California experienced blackouts during a freak 2001 winter cold snap, suffered retail electric price spikes, and then, the crisis disappeared when a $42.6 billion water bond was issued to finance the costs of cleaning the air. Wholesale power costs for 1999 were $7.4 billion but $27 billion per year for 2000 and 2001<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The official cause of the blackouts was that deregulation was botched due to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) not authorizing enough new natural gas power plants to be built to replace the old \u201cdirty\u201d plants.  However, the CPUC also did \u201cnot permit utilities to hedge their bets with long-term, bilateral contracts<\/a>\u201d (Congressional Record, Vol. 147, Part 5, 2001) that would have prevented the price spikes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This understanding of this crisis was influenced by the movie media that it was a \u201cperfect storm\u201d of a coincidental number of events:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A freak winter California cold snap,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than usual power plants were idled for maintenance,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A drought of backup hydropower in the Pacific Northwest,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A long-standing bottleneck of the Path-15 transmission line impeded sending power north or south,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cal-Trans shut down a natural gas pipeline from Texas to undertake freeway repairs,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electric ratepayers were mostly kept in the dark that $42.6<\/a> billion of unpaid mortgages (bonds) on the old power plants were stranded costs without any revenue to pay them off after the old power plants were mothballed.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

California was in a \u201cpolitical pickle\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n