The Power Utilities and the Climate Emergency
What is happening in Texas is not unusual at all. The rolling blackouts are not rare, and this is the way our power grid operators are dealing with the climate emergency.
First, American utilities were public at one point, but now many were privatized. In my state, they were privatized in 1998 in my state. And my state, California, suffered early through the hubris of the private sector which intended to maximize profits. The rolling power outages of the early 200os were bad and the crisis led, ultimately, to Enron’s demise. It also was directly related to a recall of the governor.
Enron ultimately failed and went bankrupt. But one of the reasons for that was the deaths in the state of senior citizens and the tapes that emerged showing they did not care. The country turned against them.
Newly discovered tapes have revealed how the energy corporation Enron shut down at least one power plant on false pretences, deliberately aggravating California’s crippling 2001 blackouts with the aim of raising prices.
The tapes also show that Enron, whose bankruptcy three years ago was the biggest corporate scandal of recent times, manipulated energy markets in Canada and was planning to rig the Californian market even before deregulation in 1998, for which the Texan corporation actively campaigned.
The most damning revelations concern Enron’s secret role in creating artificial power shortages in California, helping to trigger an energy crisis in 2000 and 2001 which cost residents billions of dollars in surcharges.
Many of us have not forgotten that, and some of us were not surprised when our utilities started turning the power off every time we have the threat of a major wildfire. Part of it is that they are tired of getting sued every time their equipment is directly tied to a wildfire. The last of these events was in Northern California, and Pacific Gas and Electric has filed for bankruptcy, again.
“Under the Plan we filed today, we will meet our commitment to fairly compensate wildfire victims and we will emerge from Chapter 11 financially sound and able to continue meeting California’s clean energy goals,” said Bill Johnson, PG&E Corporation’s Chief Executive Officer and President. “Throughout this…