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Time for a little Bush bashing. | by Naruki | 2006-11-19 12:55:59 |
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maybe they should move the white house | by McGowan | 2003-08-26 04:56:41 |
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More power plants? Clean ones? | by JohnClarke | 2003-08-26 06:15:53 |
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whos fault is that? | by McGowan | 2003-08-26 07:05:55 |
| In part the lunatic fringe types |
by JohnClarke |
2003-08-26 18:36:17 |
to whom every power plant is a bad power plant, who sue and agitate and lobby and picket and sabotage and do everything else they can do to delay the process of construction, so that a utility's planning goes right down the tubes. If you know you're going to need an new plant online in ten years and you start to build it and ten years later you're still tied up in court by a few nutcakes with a smart lawyer then whose fault is that?
There's also the regulation issue--regulation of "natural monopolies" such as power companies is normally a good thing, but the regulations must bear some reasonable relation to the actual operating costs of such businesses. In the case of California the regulations were apparently pretty crazy (like most of what goes on in California IMO) and the end result was that the utilities did not have the operating capital or any way to raise the operating capital to build new plants (issuing more stock or issuing bonds are fine if the financial state of the business is such that somebody will actually buy them, but if the company is already on the verge of bankruptcy then its paper is virtually unmarketable).
There are numerous other factors leading to the problem as well, but it's not simply a failure to predict the amount of service needed. |
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