Sean, You might be thinking of the Western U.S. Energy Crisis of 2000 and 2001, also known as the Enron Debacle. Indeed PG&E’s hands were tied via regulation while Enron, “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, cheated the market, electrical customers, and investors out of billions of dollars.
The crisis was triggered by partial deregulation legislation instituted in 1996 by the California Legislature (AB 1890). Enron exploited this deregulation to steal wealth via economic withholding and inflated price bidding in California's spot markets. In the meantime, PG&E (and SCE) were still fully regulated, and thus unable to react. An amazing NANOG irony from the Enron disaster was that Switch Networks in Las Vegas bought up the original Enron data center for pennies on the dollar. I became one of their earliest customers. Following Enron’s bankruptcy, Rob Roy bought Enron's mammoth (for the time) DC in an auction attended only by Rob, for less than a million bucks. Eventually Switch expanded to control the biggest data center complex in the world, and paved the way for companies like Google and Amazon to build their own hyperscale DCs. -mel On Oct 10, 2019, at 9:53 AM, Michael Thomas <m...@mtcc.com<mailto:m...@mtcc.com>> wrote: On 10/9/19 2:15 PM, William Herrin wrote: On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 12:37 PM Sean Donelan <s...@donelan.com<mailto:s...@donelan.com>> wrote: Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have started Public Safety Power Shut-offs (PSPS) in California wildfire high-risk areas. Wasn't California in a similar mess 20 years ago when government regulation at the time also put PG&E in the position that they couldn't deliver the electricity their customers wanted? Something to do with hard limits on what PG&E could do but few limits on what third parties could do to it. No. Mike Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin b...@herrin.us<mailto:b...@herrin.us> https://bill.herrin.us/
