reply to post by spooky24
There's two sides to the Enron story. The second one never received the media exposure.
California's "policy" of not building/upgrading refineries, electrical generation plants left them as an importer of energy.
Many "Enron"-like electricity producers were coal fired. The EPA had ordered them to reduce the number of days of operation in order to decrease
emissions from those plants. Court ordered fines were set to penalize the coal fired plants. These would be enacted on a daily basis. As the coal
fired plants had extant contracts to supply electricity to other states/locales, they were stretched to the limit honoring those contracts. Not
honoring them would have left other consumers energy short and would have sued the "Enrons" for breach of contract to cover their political rear
ends.
Now California, with a major population increase, has no in-house energy to supply this increase due to their internal "regulations" restricting new
and upgraded plants.
So California tries to "buy" energy from Enron who replies we don't have a surplus to sell to you.
California sues Enron, I don't know what the legal argument was, perhaps discriminatory, and wins!
Enron is court-ordered to supply energy to California.
Now there's a classic "rock and a hard place". Court ordered to supply Ca., court restricted coal firing days, maxed output to supply existing
contracts facing breach of contract suits if they take energy away from those users.
They fired up the extra days, paid the EPA fines, and of course, surcharged California those extra expenses plus, plus.
Now Ca. goes after Enron as the evil Corporation who gets smeared in the media for price gouging...
Moral of the story is "regulated" or not, state or federal, the game playing is on both sides, private AND public.
The rest is just smoke, including, I suspect, the motive behind this thread...follow the money trail.