Recent Science Hoaxes Reruns of 2001 California Energy Crisis
13 hours ago Guest Blogger
Wayne Lusvardi
Has anyone called for a separation of media from government?
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.
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 and movie 2005) but to avoid conveying power when the grid was congested, which lowered prices.
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.
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 “dirty” power plants were replaced with less-polluting natural gas power plants built and operated by merchant energy producers not utilities. Moreover, this decentralization by so-called deregulation undercut the Rate Base and economy of larger scale of regulated utilities resulting in higher prices.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/12/recent-science-hoaxes-reruns-of-2001-california-energy-crisis/
