At 03:03 PM 7/11/2002 -0700, Gary E. Miller wrote:

Yo Martin!

If there is plenty of power in CA then howcum there was a "stage 2" alert yesterday and a "market alert today"? Today's "projected demand" equaled "available resources" today If demand played out as expected there would have been big trouble in CA today.

A lot of data surrounding the Enron collapse suggests that power traders artificially manipulated CA's power market, and also suggests that a lot of the previous summers warnings of power problems were also artificially created. All over the country, building of "extra" capacity has slowed. Some due to new sources that came online, some due to the fact that a decrease in power was realized as a result of the falloff in the economy. Could it be that CA is experiencing a normal surge in power utilization and the warning is part of a normal cycle? Regards, -- Martin Hannigan hannigan@fugawi.net