Day: January 12, 2001

I keep watching the news and seeing a strange claim made over and over again: since the wholesale price of electricity increased in California, electricity deregulation is a failure. Huh? Although what California did was reregulate rather than deregulate its power utilities, the system seems to be working relatively well.

Anytime a commodity is in short supply, as electricty is in California, its price should spike. This is a signal to the market that more of that commodity is demanded by consumers and capital investment should shift to producing that commodity — in this case electricity.

The real problem that California has is that the state has created a number of regulatory hurdles that make it very difficult for companies to enter to build new power plants. If you had a pile of money and wanted to get into the business of generating electricity, California’s the last place you’d want to build.

Here’s a prime example of the sort of nonsense you’ll face in California. A few years ago Calpine Corporation wanted to build a geothermal power plant at Medicine Lake. Rather than burn coal or use nuclear power, the geothermal plant would have pumped water from the lake which would in turn run turbines and generate about 50 megawatts. Environmentalists still showed up to protest, arguing that the huge plumes of steam — which are the main byproduct of a geothermal power plant — would make the otherwise scenic area aesthetially unattractive.

Why wait 7 years or more for approval — and then have to suffer through the inevitable protests and lawsuits — to build a power plant in California, when Texas will do it in 2 years?

MSNBC reports that at least nine web sites maintained by state agencies that list convicted sex offenders have very lax security. According to MSNBC, the sites could easily be hacked. Someone intent on doing damage could potentially add or delete people from the databases.

MSNBC also looks at the controversy surrounding putting such offender databases on the Internet. I think making records of criminal offenses for violent crimes and sexual offenses available on the Internet is a very good idea. Michigan is one of the states that posts sex offender lists on a web site, and by doing a search we learned that the nice old man down the street who is always so friendly was a convicted sexual offender.

Of course the system only works if people act reasonably. Nobody in our neighborhood, to my knowledge, as even mentioned to this gentleman that his name is on the sex offenders list, and we treat him pretty much the same, though people are definitely more cautious with their children than they were before learning of his conviction.

The biggest problem with the current version of the sex offenders list is that it doesn’t give details on the type of crime or when the conviction occurred. For example, if the man in our neighborhood was convicted of statutory rape for having sex with his 15 year old girlfriend when he was 20 back in the 1950s, that’s an entirely different matter than if he was convicted of molesting a child a few years ago. The sex offenders list, however, doesn’t give that sort of context.

More than sex offenders, however, I’d really like to be able to access violent crime records. Pretty much everybody in my neighborhood seems to have a conviction or two. The two young men in their twenties living next to me have each served time for armed robbery, for example. For awhile a woman in my neighborhood was dating a man who had just been released from jail after serving 15 years for a murder.