“the father of deregulation”.[who?] Wilson admitted publicly that defects in the deregulation system would need fixing by “the next governor”.
PG&E electric meter on Angel Island.
The new rules called for the Investor Owned Utilities, or IOUs, (primarily Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric) to sell off a significant part of their electricity generation to wholly private, unregulated companies such as AES, Reliant, and Enron. The buyers of those power plants then became the wholesalers from which the IOUs needed to buy the electricity that they used to own themselves.
While the selling of power plants to private companies was labeled “deregulation”, in fact Steve Peace and the California legislature expected that there would be regulation by the FERC which would prevent manipulation. The FERC’s job, in theory, is to regulate and enforce Federal law, preventing market manipulation and price manipulation of energy markets. When called upon to regulate the out-of-state privateers which were clearly manipulating the California energy market, the FERC hardly reacted at all and did not take serious action against Enron, Reliant, or any other privateers. FERC’s resources are in fact quite sparse in comparison to their entrusted task of policing the energy market. Lobbying by private companies may also have slowed down regulation and enforcement.
Supply and demand
California’s utilities came to depend in part on the import of excess hydroelectricity from the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon and Washington.[citation needed] California’s groundbreaking clean air
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