[Cicero]

I won't say this is a bad idea, but once again it's only partial deregulation. And they won't be out of the woods until they dump several hundred rules and regulations that make it impossible to build new power plants. As it stands now, the envirowackoes can stall a new plant forever, and nobody would be crazy enough to build a new plant in that political environment.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The company I worked for tried to build a small facility in Stockton. After chewing thru the air resources board, the county and city boards and even a neighborhood vote, we moved to Reno and were up and running in 4 months.

[Clara Lou]

You answered my question for me-- the enviro-whackos. Deregulation seems to have worked well for Texas, so I was wondering why it didn't/couldn't in California. [Our envirowhackos all seem to be clustered in Austin.]

[SAJ]

Exactly so, and well said. Unless capacity is added, any dereg scheme will be just one hard winter away from another debacle (although presumably CA learned SOMEthing from the 2000-2001 fiasco). Why they don't use PA as a model is very curious; not a perfect plan, of course (what is?), but sound enough in its basics.

[Willie Green]

And they won't be out of the woods until they dump several hundred rules and regulations that make it impossible to build new power plants.

Well the only "deregulation" the politicians ever monkey with are the financial gyrations dictated by lawyers and accountants. And the only thing they ever achieve is to make the whole system even MORE unfathomable to the average Joe.

The obvious technological solution to California's future energy requirements is to build modern, efficient NUKES with sufficient capacity to assure a safe, abundant and reliable supply.

Market forces work AGAINST this or any other rational solution. A competitive market achieves "efficiency" by SHEDDING excess capacity and increasing utilization of existing facilities. On balance, it is also short-sighted and risk averse to investing in new capacity. New capacity is only constructed in response to rising prices dictated by supply shortages. All-in-all, market competition is too volatile to assure a stable and abundant supply.

The regulated public utility model served our nation well for many, many decades. IMHO, we should dispense with this "free market" experiment, return to the public utility concept, and build more Nukes.