[OT]: Involuntary outages may start at 7am PST
Uh, PG&E does buy power at the market. They are simply not allowed to sell power at the market price, which is the root cause of the problem. Deregulation tends to work when both sides are fully deregulated (buying and selling). Crimping the creation of new power plants and being forced to sell essentially unlimited amounts of power at a nearly fixed price caused this mess. Blame the environmentalists and politicians, not PG&E. Prabhu
-----Original Message----- From: Nathan Stratton [mailto:nathan@robotics.net] Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 10:27 PM To: Sean Donelan Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Involuntary outages may start at 7am PST
On 22 Jan 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:
Have any Internet providers or private data centers announced any voluntary "good neighbor" measures such as wider temperature and humdity limits, lights-out operation, off-peak use of heavy electrical demands for laser printers, etc.
Don't take this the wrong way, but frankly I would not be happy if my colo providers started implementing wider temperature and humdity limits. I pay large amounts of money for colo and I want what I am paying for. This mess was caused by California regulators and very very greedy PG&E who gambled on lower rates and lost. PG&E should be forces to liquidate other out of state assets and buy power at the market.
-Nathan
From: "Kavi, Prabhu" <prabhu_kavi@tenornetworks.com> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 11:06:07 -0500 Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Uh, PG&E does buy power at the market. They are simply not allowed to sell power at the market price, which is the root cause of the problem.
Deregulation tends to work when both sides are fully deregulated (buying and selling). Crimping the creation of new power plants and being forced to sell essentially unlimited amounts of power at a nearly fixed price caused this mess. Blame the environmentalists and politicians, not PG&E.
No, blame PG&E (and So. Cal. Edison), at least in part. PG&E made a bet that energy prices would not increase dramatically before 2002. PG&E proposed the price freeze with the notion that competition among suppliers would bring down prices and they would continue to sell at the old rates, raking in excellent profits. PG&E lost, big time, when the poorly designed electrical market in the western states ended up charging massively increased prices which PG&E and they were locked into their freeze commitment. Once again, the freeze was proposed by PG&E. They made their bed. It is, of course, vastly more complicated than this. The deal also included bonds to pay off existing capital debts and a requirement that PG&E get out of the power generation business. (PG&E proposed these, too.) At the time it looked like a super-sweetheart deal for the power companies. Time has shown otherwise. But they knew what they were doing and they lost. Speaking only for myself, R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer E-mail: oberman@home.com Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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