A report made public Friday by federal regulators reveals in stunning detail how two energy companies appear to have conspired to drive up power prices during California's energy crisis.
The disclosure comes just days after the companies -- Williams Cos. of Tulsa, Okla., and AES Corp. of Arlington, Va. -- received subpoenas from federal prosecutors who are investigating whether they and other firms manipulated energy prices in 2000 and 2001.
According to the report, Williams and AES employees discussed prolonging an outage at one Southern California power plant in spring 2000 to take advantage of higher prices that the California Independent System Operator was paying to replace the missing power.
Dick Cheney should resign over this, frankly.
"What's happened in California, I would argue, is they've taken the route of saying, 'well we can conserve our way out of the problem. All we have to do is conserve. we don't have to produce any more power.' So they haven't built any more electric plants in the last ten years in California and today they've got rolling blackouts, because they don't have enough electricity. They've got rising prices. They've got a whole complex of problems that are caused by relying only on conservation and not doing anything about the supply side of the equation."
Wonder if these people ever tire of being wrong. Probably not, as the liberal media never calls them on it.