Well, lemme tell ya... They'd like to do the same to PG&E. They've finally turned the management into GANG-GREEN members in a most malicious mischeif manner!!!
The Sacramento Municipal Utilities District, which is also home to a GANG-GREEN mob of "Progressives," has installed more hydro-electric dams on the abreviated length of the American River than most longer rivers in CA. The commercial whitewater rafting corporations benefit fabulously because there is still stored water to raft on Labor Day. Floods happen really fast on a river whose final break is only Folsom Dam!!!
They also shut down a muclear reactor at Rancho Seco just south of our CA Crapitol after Jane Fonda's "China Syndrome" movie which she evidently convinced the voters/ratepayers of SMUD was a likely reality!!!
The commercial whitewater rafting corporations benefit fabulously because there is still stored water to raft on Labor Day.
Yet they, the "Progressives" and EnvironMentalists fought and have killed a multi-purpose dam above Folsom Reservoir from being completed in 1977 that was 2/3rds completed at a sunk cost of multi millions of squandered taxpayers resources!!!
Again I beg to differ. While greenies certainly lobbied against the Auburn project, the project collapsed because of financial considerations. Specifically:
While the feds were obviously willing to stand the cost of flood control, no agreement could be reached regarding the substantial, additional cost of water storage and power generation. The only local consensus was that both the water stored and the power generated would not be voluntarily ceded to existing water or utility districts. The promoters could not reach a consensus on who would distribute the water or the power. Without a consensus, the feds were left holding the whole bag. Because of the conflicting local opinions, the feds could not clearly identify a method to recover the substantial, additional expense. More than quadruple the cost of 100 year flood control .
It is PGE (Portland General Electric) that was a part of Enron. Oregon's former Governor Neil Goldschmidt (as part of a holding group with control of the utility) was in the midst of orchestrating a plan to convert that utility to government ownership when a sex scandal involving him and an under age girl forced his disappearance from the public scene. The plan to do that still exists but with the original driving force out of the picture it is moving slower.
I live in Eugene and we've had a government owned electric/water utility forever. In theory it's not a bad way to go and 20 years ago we had almost the best electric & water rates in the country. Now, with the influx of social progressives on the board we see much squandered on feelgood environMental crap and some of the first of many to come windmill farm boondoggles, plus all the usual self sabotage of it's own hydro power licensing efforts, union perks, a beautiful palace on prime city riverfront property, and so on ad infinitum. Rates across the board have quadrupled and I think now most of the state's other electric utility rates are cheaper. But the Eugene utility is oh so green and fully devoted to social justice, you can just feel the love.
Oh they had their nuclear boondoggle too. They originally partnered with PGE in planning and building the old Trojan plant, then turned anti-nuclear and never drew a watt-hour of it's juice in the plant's 20 some year run.