As to the foul mouths, I have been in sales meetings were folks like to draw analogies to hunting and killing their competitors by making sales and watching brand X's employee have their homes foreclosed on. I feel such talk is "over the line" and not good buisness practice. Time is money and meetings should be about exchanging needed information, not about posturing and shooting one's mouth off.
It is clear from the government relations tape that someone was trying to justify their job and contribution to Enron's bottom line, in the hopes of either getting a bonus or staying employed. As such they were fishing for straws they could grasp at to make their point to the home office.
As for the sc@#&^!ing aunt Millie, that is just trash talk, that while not illegal, will do much to impress a jury and more importantly draw public scrutiny away from the utility with the highest retail rates in Washington State that released the information & tapes publicly.
I understand that this utility is despirately trying to find any reason to allow a court to nulify a $100 million obligation they have to Enron. I wish them luck. They may get a jury (but not a bankruptcy judge or FERC Administrative law judge) to throw out the contract cancelation feature of their contract with Enron, due to some of the trash-talk tape language.
Now as to the can this powerplant be shut down. That gets to an interesting area of anti-trust law. The real question with those comments is, "who are the folks talking and what is their possition? What kind of plant were they talking about?"
Shutting down a power plant is not something that is done lightly at a utility (at least in my experience). With the exception of peaking plants, shutting down a plant is a big deal. For example, when I designed base load plants at Bechtel Power, we did something call "hot springing" the steam lines. Steam lines and boiler tubes will expand in length as the temperature and power level increases. We often made sure that the pipe was cut so that mechanical stress on the pipe was at a minimum when the plant was near full power production. This meant that when a plant was shut down, you had huge mechanical stress on the piping. That meant that things were more likely to break during a shut down as forces increased.
Similarly, in figuring out maintenance on a combustion turbine or deisel generating peaking unit, each start-up and shut down is counted as many hours of operation in the "hours of operation between major maintenance outages."
Because of these kinds of factors, often times shutting down a plant is something that requires plant managers approval and a review of maintenance impacts and requirements, as you usually try to do maintenance when a plant is down, if at all possible. If nothing else, you usually want to have maintenance people on hand to make sure nothing bad has happened and help you get it back up and running again.
Therefore, the question on the plant shut down, is did the folks doing the talking have the ability to get the plant to shut down? If they did then this might be an anti-trust violation showing market manipulation. If their positions were such that they were just asking questions about options and or just doing wishful thinking (if x happens then the price I can charge for Y will go through the roof and I will get a bonus), it is just bad PR.
With all the investigations that occurred on the part of California and FERC over the maintenance shutdowns at certain powerplants during the Cal Power Crisis, I would be surprised if there were now "new reasons" for the shutdowns. I seem to remember that plant managers and the responsible officials were grilled pretty harshly on those shutdowns as California officials were sure that was the smoking market manipulation gun. Again, I see this part of the tapes as likely "old news" but could influence a jury over a contract cancelation clause.
Stir it anyway you like, these guys are crooks and give conservatism a bad name. You want protectionism to prevail, just let the crooks have a free rein and it will come.