Re "Once Braced for a Power Shortage, California Now Finds Itself With a Surplus" (news article, Nov. 4): You cite only Davis administration sources who attribute the state's power woes to federal regulators and gouging power producers.
Whining about price-gouging power suppliers isn't going to get them anywhere, particularly when the state has the bad grace to pick on price-gougers who contributed vast sums of money to the Bush election campaign.
Wholesale electricity prices soared tenfold from early this week, causing consumer advocates to speculate about the kind of price-gouging by power plant owners that officials documented last summer.
Even California's Governor Gray Davis, usually the most vitriolic of the lot, praised the FERC decision as "a step in the right direction," though he then demanded that his state be paid $9 billion in refunds for price-gouging by power firms.Whatever they are called, the FERC actions this week are unlikely to help Californians avoid blackouts this summer any more than real price caps would.
Accounts from the peninsula documented how the storm swamped streets, gouged out roads, toppled trees and left an estimated 1 million people without power in Florida alone.
A1 Political Fallout Over Energy Gov. Gray Davis of California faulted President Bush for not ordering caps on wholesale power prices, assailed previous governors for not having had more power plants built, accused power companies of gouging the state, and announced the hiring of two former aides to Al Gore.
As companies like British Telecom and British Rail were transformed into private companies, how could the regulators prevent them from exploiting their monopoly power to gouge the public, rather than innovating and investing?
But viewing the Gozo coastline from under the water, with all its grottoes and fissures gouged out by the sea, leaves me in no doubt about its relentless power.
Among the 10 stocks, the second largest at each fund is Duke Energy, which has been sued along with other power generators by two California politicians who contend that the companies illegally gouged the state by billions of dollars.
Her body, so elegant from the front, is gouged with a mirror-covered cavity in the back, of a kind found in medicine-packed power figures used for divination or other, more aggressive exercises in supernatural control.
