Politics & the “Blackout of 2003″
Posted on August 18th, 2003 by uruloki
Even though the investigators have not managed to track the root cause of the blackout, the politicians sure know whose fault it is. Its all President Bush’s. The biggest issue is apparently the deregulation of the electric industry.
I think that we have a lot of unanswered questions about where we’re heading in this deregulated, privatized energy world.
The problem is, they only ever deregulated the ownership of the energy companies. What they didn’t do is relax the regulations on the construction of additional capacity. The biggest problem in the CA brownouts? The folks where the companies wanted to build the additional capacity said, “Not in our backyard!” That, combined with the dedicated enviromental movement in California, combined to create a completely avoidable situation. So now, they want to bring back the regulations: In fact, several of us tried to support an amendment last year that would have put some federal dollars and federal muscle behind trying to put in some safeguards, more reliability into the system, and were unsuccessful. So I hope that this is a wake up call to the administration and to others that in addition to looking at how we need to get more supply, we’ve got to do a better job with our transmission system and we also have to have some, you know, federal muscle and some back up in the federal energy regulatory scheme.
What the socialists will never understand is that any successful company, by definition, has as its first priority its customers. The customers of a company are where it derives the bottom line from, without a customer the company has no market and therefore it won’t exist. However, there must be a balance between the costs of new construction with the anticipated growth in profits in the future. When the activists are fighting to shut down current capacity, what incentive is there to try to create more? It doesn’t help that potheads are still protesting one of the cleanest, longest lasting sources of power we have.
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