Posted on 05/24/2002 4:42:25 AM PDT by snopercod
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:46:32 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Two utilities based in Portland, Ore., said they may have unwittingly aided schemes to manipulate electricity prices during the Western energy crisis of 2000.
In filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday, PacifiCorp, a unit of Scottish Power PLC, and Portland General Electric, a unit of Houston-based Enron Corp., said they may have been unknowing intermediaries in so-called megawatt-laundering trades designed to avoid California price caps.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
That works out to 0.064%, but Enron will be blamed for the upcoming bankruptcy of California.
One of the things that I use to do long ago was to "load factor" which was to send off peak power to a utility that could use the power and get them to send me back a little less electricity or at a slightly higher rate about 12 hours later during peak load hours when I needed it. That helped me serve my peak load at a fair price and the firm doing the load factoring could make a little money as well.
It will be an interesting summer with charges and counter charges. I wonder what it will be like when the dust settles.
Exactly. I have tried discreetly to broach this problem with Jim Robinson, but feel like I was rebuffed each time I did. He responded as if I were stupid and didn't know how to properly use the search engine. Also, he ignored my queries (twice) on why google.com no longer finds anything on FR when doing a site specific search. I know Jim must be very busy, so maybe my questions just got lost in the clutter.
Ernest, backhoe, myself, and several others spent weeks indexing every "calpowercrisis" article we could find. I personally indexed over 500 articles over a period of several week - finding them on google, then indexing them by posting "To:calpowercrisis". At the time I thought I was adding something of value to the forum.
If there is a way to find these old articles now, I don't know what it is. The new search engine works really well, but only searches on titles, AFAIK. Maybe John is working on an enhancement...or maybe not.
Also, I've been wondering lately why I've been putting in KEYWORDS all these years. I would scan entire articles and add the appropriate names in that field, assuming that "someday" this information might be valuable to people like Alamo-Girl. I hope it will be again.
The only way I'm able to find old articles these days is by searching my hard drive for the title of articles that I know I posted, then searching FR for that. It works, but only for articles that I posted.
I'm sure Jim has his reasons, but certainly he must be aware that FR in it's present condition is no longer useful for research. I'm guessing that the present limitations are intentional, and are probably due the the lawsuit. Or maybe Jim's just tired of working long hours for peanuts.
I could sure understand that, but would like to hear him explain what the heck is going on if he can. I feel like all that time I spent researching and cross-linking threads is now wasted.
It's Jim's forum, and he owes me nothing, and I owe him plenty. Still, I feel like I am part of a community of like minded people here, and feel justified in bringing this up.
If it's just a lack of funding for a proper search engine, I would glady to contribute to that, but somehow I sense there is something else going on.
If there is, we should know what it is so we can help.
google.com effectively cut FR off in February. There was a thread on that, initiated by sandy, I think. The Washington Post is a paying customer of google. You should be aware of this.
I humbly request that you incorporate the ability to search the "To:" field as well as the "Keyword:" field in your redesign.
For the record, I clicked on the CALPOWERCRISIS keyword at the top of this article as Jim_Rob suggested. Same thing - I only got twenty articles.
Only goes back to January, but it's better than nothing.
Jim and John might well have complaints, for many good reasons, about such an activity, and we'd honor that which could put a complete stop to this idea in a big hurry. Then if that was ok, we'd have to setup a search engine on that data, and put it online, from a web site that was prepared to handle some traffic. Hmmm ... wish I had the capacity to do that. I can imagine being able (with permission from Jim, John and my wife <grin>) to suck down the pages, and being able to setup a search engine. I'm in no position to even dream of hosting such a site once it was ready for others to search. Then if we succeed, I might get to chat with some big city lawyers working for one of my (un)favorite newspapers. Joy oh joy.
Too bad about Google cutting us off.
The local links would be faster, but would lack the graphics and mostly lack the navigation outside the article to any other part of the FR site. And it would be harder for anyone else to ever take the local copy of the articles away from you. Each month or two, we could release another CD, with articles since the last. This would dramatically reduce the distribution and availability of this search capability, which is quite unfortunate (except for the side affect of staying below some dang lawyers radar). It would also make the distribution cost proportionate to the number of recipients (copies of the CDs), and cheaper than keeping up a web site.
Perhaps we could get John and Jim to let us have (for the price of a modest donation and a disk drive) a copy of the FR articles so far, so we wouldn't have to suck them over the web. Then we just need a search tool of limited ability. That should be doable, maybe, maybe not ...
Distributing a few dozens or hundreds of copies of FR would have a major benefit of keeping its archive immune from being shutdown by outside forces.
I wonder what happened at the beginning of this year. We know google cut us off in February, and soon after that the FR search engine stopped finding older posts. The archives were "locked", so that if we happened to find an old post of interest, we couldn't "bump" it. Now the archives are simply "unavailable".
It's like watching the Cheshire cat disappear...
Some Executive says --" We have 3 million records in there and I don't understand if it is in the machine why in hell we can't get it out!!!"
Those numbers seem way too low!
Yes, my post will sound familiar to those in the computer business. I punched my first card in the late 60's, while protests against the Vietnam war were raging outside. Since then I've worked a number of systems, large and small, mostly Unix the last 25 years, including a very custom search engine that is in heavy use 24x7 for the last 8 years on a 0.6 Terabyte pile of data.
Take a look at the URL for this post:
Notice the article number 688797. Try typing in a similar URL, with article number 10, as in You will see a post on the Zogby poll from Sept 1998. I've tried several post numbers in between, and found articles arranged in time, since then. And the links to some articles I liked on my home page, dating back to late 2000 when I joined the FreeRepublic, still work.
I can well imagine 14 reasons from Sunday why you might not like this idea, so if you want to say no, go right ahead.
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