For months now, California Gray Davis has been moaning about the evils of private power companies charging that state outrageous prices for electricity, and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer even went so far as to say that, “I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi my name is Spike, honey.'”
But it turns out that while Enron and other companies may be greedy bastards, the politicians in this case are of the lying variety — the prices California was paying to Enron and other private companies for power was a bargain compared to what it was paying public utilities to buy power.
Of course as National Review notes, Davis only released information on exactly how much each utility was charging California for power after a lawsuit forced his hand.
It turns out that while private companies were charging California $250 per megawatt, the L.A. Department of Water & Power was charing the state $292 per megawatt, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District a whopping $330 per megawatt. Meanwhile California managed to pay Seattle’s City Light Department an amazing $634 per megawatt of electricity.
The added irony in this, by the way, is that municipal power departments like this are allowed to buy power from the federal government at prices far below what most private utilities can produce electricity at. So these utilities were buying electricty at extremely low prices and then turning around and charging prices far in excess of what private companies were charging.
I wonder if Lockyer wants to personally escort the people who run the public utilites to 8-by-10 cells?
Source:
The Suits Tell the Tale: Gov. Davis deceived Californians about the energy crisis. Jerry Taylor and Pete VanDoren, National Review Online, July 27, 2001.