Thanks for the prior link.
I have one last simple question.
If all the California Utilities had a ton of cash, and prices were not a problem, would there still be rolling blackouts going on today?
IOW…
Are the blackouts caused soley by the supply problem?
If I understand the situation correctly. If the power companies had a pile of money they could buy power from out of state. This is what they were doing before but now they have run out of money and can not borrow any more.
The answer to your first question is no.
The short answer is probably no, but the long answer is maybe. Deregulation took a lot of functions normally done by the utilities and sort of assumed the “market” would take care of them. One of these was scheduled maintenance. Power plants have to be shut down periodically for various types of maintenance, and if you own ten of them you can schedule it so only one is down at a time. If you only own one or two, and you get paid a different price for electricity at different times, then you schedule your outages for the historically cheapest times, just like everyone else.
In California, you also have limited NOx credits, meaning you can only burn so much fuel since most of the plants have the lowest NOx burners they can get already, so you run hot and heavy during the expensive power times, and you shut down during the cheap times.
Since this started, there haven’t been any “cheap” times, but no one coordinates the outages either, so plants shut down almost at random, creating shortages and driving the prices up further.
Also, just a clarification, utilites don’t have lots of money really. Before this whole mess started you could bankrupt a utility if you shut it’s billing down for a few weeks. Huge amounts of money pass through the utilities weekly, but most of it goes right back out the door again. I used to do tons of consulting with SCE, and there was a building in Rosemead across from their headquarters that had unbelievable security around it. Metal detectors, armed guards, cameras and everything. I asked what went on there, expecting defense-related top secret research or something, and they explained that it housed the billing equipment, like computers and printers and stuff. I asked why and they went into the economics thing. Too strange.