Posted on 10/02/2002 4:44:15 AM PDT by snopercod
LOS ANGELES -(Dow Jones)- AES Corp's role in the California power market was mischaracterized in a report by state regulators that said energy firms failed to generate available power during blackouts, the company said in a response to the report seen by Dow Jones Newswires.
AES owns and operates three power plants from which it has agreed to sell all the energy to the Williams Companies . The contract price of power isn't affected by the real-time market price, and AES generates power only when told to do so by Williams, AES said.
"For those reasons, it also is a mistake to lump together the AES entities and Williams as 'Williams/AES' when discussing the dispatch and generation of available electricity and the bidding of available electricity," the company wrote in a response sent to state Sen. Joseph Dunn, D-Santa Ana, Sept. 26.
A Dunn aide verified receipt of the AES response last week.
Dunn chairs a committee that is investigating wholesale price manipulation in the state's energy markets, and requested responses from the six companies named in the report by the California Public Utilities Commission that was released Sept. 17. The report said that plants run by AES, and marketed by Williams, "had, on average, over 100 megawatts of available power that it did not bid into the ISO's real time market during service interruption hours on nine of the 32 statewide service days. Thus, Williams/AES did not bid available power into the market in an amount equivalent to a significant fraction of the service interruptions occurring on those nine days."
Given that AES has no role in marketing electricity, the company isn't in a position to comment about bidding practices related to available power, or generation/non-generation of available power, the AES response said.
The CPUC report, while claiming to take generators at face value that their reported outages were legitimate, intimates that AES had a motivation to manipulate the power market, which is untrue, the AES response said.
In general, the CPUC report fails to properly account for air quality restrictions that made it impossible to run plants without breaking the law, AES said.
The CPUC report said most of the state's blackouts and service interruptions during the 2000-2001 energy crisis could have been avoided if generators had produced all available power. Generators didn't follow the instructions of the state's grid operator and didn't make plants available as soon as possible after outages, the CPUC report said.
Duke Energy and Mirant Corp (NYSE:MIR - News) responded last week to the report, saying it was was based on inaccurate outage data, underplayed the role of the state's grid operator in determining which plants are run and when, and overstated plant capacity.
Reliant Resources, Inc (NYSE:RRI - News) and Dynegy Corp are still working on their responses. Williams will respond Tuesday afternoon, said spokeswoman Paula Hall- Collins.
As reported, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Patrick Wood III said Tuesday he would support a proposal to certify whether power plant and transmission line operators have legitimate reasons, such as repairs and maintenance, for outages that disrupt the market.
-By Jessica Berthold, Dow Jones Newswires; 323-658-3872; jessica.berthold@dowjones.com
Power plant to pay record $17 million emissions penalty
Thursday, December 14, 2000
By Chris Knap, The Orange County Register, Calif.
Power-plant operator AES Corp. will pay a record $17 million penalty as part of a settlement of charges that the company pumped 700,000 pounds of illegal emissions into Southern California's air.
So now we know the report didn't take into account emissions limits and directives from the ISO and also overstated production capacity.
What in the world was this report based on?
Gray Davis's desire to get re-elected, clearly.
But what really pi$$es me off is that the original CPUC fantasy-piece was widely carried in the national press. When the truth of the matter starts to trickle out, papers like the Wall Street Journal, the SF Chron, the LA Slimes, the SacBee, the San Diego Union aren't interested.
This story is a good example of a reporter looking for truth and balance by quoting at face value two opposing sides. Some reporters have adopted the legal system where opposing sides are used to spew out information that contains bits and pieces of the truth so that the juror or reader can then use their common sense to learn the truth. Other reporters believe that their world view is the one that needs to be reported and bias the heck out of what they cover. Still others (very rare) try to figure out the truth and report it.
By the way, did you see that Willie Brown SF mayor wants to be the president of Cal PERS. That should be a disaster for the retirees of the state.
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And he will get the position if Davis is reelected!
Awful! Just Awful! AWGH!!!
As for newspapers, many of them are just for entertainment purposes. But some claim to be publishers of truth, or at least accurate information. For instance, when I terminated my WSJ subscription and told one of their reporters why, he responded with:
Sorry about your decision. I'll keep striving to be as fair, accurate and incisive as I always have.
Well that's exactly why I chose not to pay for their services any more: They were NOT fair, NOT accurate, and DEFINITELY NOT incisive. To this day, they have not printed a retraction, clarification, or anything. IOW, they simply don't care about the truth any more.
They printed a Loretta Lynch press release almost verbatim, and did not even bother to call the victims for their side of the story (which is dribbling out now, but only in out-of-the-way places).
I do know a former reporter, and he told me that on slow news days, they would just make up some news. For instance, they would make an anonymous phone call to the police saying there was a group of prostitutes walking the streets in front of the local hotel. When the police cars showed up, they would photograph that and report that "the police were investigation a prostitution ring at the Central Hotel" or something like that.
Needless to say, this guy is a clintonista all the way.
I forgot to flag you on this over on the other thread about the LA Slimes skewd poll:
2:04PM Electro Scientific to close Calif. plant (ESIO) by Tomi Kilgore
Electro Scientific Industries (ESIO) said it would relocate the manufacturing of its electronic component systems products from Escondido, Calif. to Portland, Ore. by the end of the year, leading to a reduction in workforce of 100 employees. The company expects to record a fiscal second quarter charge of $9 million as a result of the move, which is expected to result in annual savings of over $8 million. The stock is ticking up 15 cents to $16.53.
Did the WSJ print a "correction" or something?
Seriously, if you look at the pollution control requirements, the high taxes (and likely to go higher), the high cost of land for business buildings and employee homes, the high cost of electricity for the next twenty years due to the bonds, the lack of water, the earthquake damage potential that is basically uninsurable, the "over the top" employee legislation like having to do with worker rights to leave, the fame of California juries to award huge judgements against companies, and a host of other things; California will have a hard time keeping its current industry and that industry will have a hard time healing this economic down turn.
In the past California primed the pump with wonderful weather/employee lifestyle and with a very well (college) educated citizenry. The State Budget crunch will really harm the ability to deal with everything from taffice to basic fire and police services.
Yes and then we'll have a crime wave and the Jerry Brown, Gray Davis continuium will have finally succeeded in stopping all economic growth, population growth, urban sprawl, environmental degradation and removal of man-made boundaries, such as borders you can't see from space.
The majestic State that daddy "Pat" Brown presided over, that I admired as a child in elementary school in IL while taking the CA Standard Achievement Test, will have been "brought down" to help make the USA less powerful so that "earth could be more fair"(H.R.C.'s commencement speech)!
Not till CA has a financial collapse of Argentinian proportions and we are all in Cuban "equitable servitude," under UN control, will these Commonists be happy with the commonality of misery!!! To hell with them!!!
There Grampa Dave! Let's see ya top that rant!!!
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