Second, attempting to read the minds of Enron's traders as to their motives or 'criminal intent' is a laughable waste of time. I've traded with these guys (and, yes, 98+% of them are men) for years and I'll tell you right now what their motive is, every day: make a profit...which, oddly, is my motive, too.
When the loonies in the Calbanian legislature dreampt up that faux-'deregulation' scheme, they guaranteed -- guaranteed -- that the citizens were going to get their pockets picked all day, every day, if the power mkts EVER became even slightly unbalanced. And you'd better believe that every decent energy trader in America (elsewhere, too, probably) was out for a piece of their pocketbooks, yr hmbl srvnt included. The nearest thing I've ever seen to a dead layup lock cinch.
A Calpine trader famously (well, in the NY Slimes anyway) characterized trading with the bureaudorks in ISO and with the waterboys as 'playing poker with second-graders'. He was far too charitable; it was playing poker with kindergartners with Alzheimer's.
You'll notice that Grayout Doofus doesn't ever even allege specific 'criminal' (sic) acts. That's because he cannot; the rules the legislature and the other assorted Calbanian morons implemented were (still are, btw) so self-contradictory that not even a Philadelphia lawyer could tell you which practices were lawful and which not. Some number of people are whining that Enron, Calpine, Duke and the boys 'gamed' the system. You bet your sweet butt they did -- which is the best possible argumenr for prohibiting incompetent hustlebuck shysters and Pollyanna do-gooders from even running for office or otherwise being employed by taxpayers. If you should invent a game where the rules are not clearly defined AND you can only win under, in essence, perfect circumstances, you've only yourself to blame when you get your clock cleaned (notice how Grayout now is trying to crawfish on the state's long-term power contracts? what did you expect?)
Gitmo's got it right. The retail price caps were the fuse on the dynamite; well before NG reached $70/MMBTU @ Topock in the second week in December, the whole market was going to blow. Curiously, even as late as early October, the dildoes could have saved the situation by simply removing the regulations and the caps and letting the market clear (which, if you don't happen to know from experience, happens in typically 48-72 hrs; the power mkts are VERY efficient, when they're allowed to be), but noooooooooo -- these clowns literally bet the ranch on a mild winter, and how bloody bright is that? Worse, they knew perfectly well in the summer that power was going to be tight, NG particularly, and took NO constructive action (made things much worse, actually).
It was the episode of the Taggart tunnel in real life, courtesy of The Doofus Who Would Be King.
I LOVE IT!
Conveniently Davis didn't comment on his own ISO's complicity in "gaming the system". The CA ISO was found to have called Enron and others getting them to put fake bids in on excess power they were selling, so that other companies who wanted to buy the power, then resell it, would have to pay the CA ISO more.
California's market is the opposite of a free market, and it should come as no surprise to conservatives that traders in the private sector turned out to be much smarter than those who wrote the laws, and the bureaucrats who tried to compete with them.