B.C. vows to continue fight over costly U.S. ruling on power sales to California

Ran into this little gem while reading the paper this morning. Nice hundred of millions of dollars owed by BC.


But this is the part that really really really pissed me off.



We didn't cause the spike it was caused by an American company that no longer exists so I guess this is a version of the sue everyone mentality so if you can't get the blood out of the stone that's the problem someone else should be expected to pay.



Gee why the fuck don't you go after big Amercian Oil Companies who are doing the same thing. It's called the market place and if this judge had noticed it's also how wall street works.

Maybe it's time to become isolationists.

Buying low and selling high is smart business, BCHydro is there to provide BC with safe, affordable, reliable power.

Not California.

BC Hydro didn't put a gun to anyone's head and force them to buy their power. Enron was the main engineer of the whole bloody situation, but kind of hard to get anything out of a corpse.

How can a US court somehow force a Canadian company to refund California over a bill a decade ago, which occurred due to the high cost of electricity, and not some faulty accounting issue or a scheme?

Wait wait, I bought gasoline back when prices were $4+ a gallon in Michigan! I demand a $1 refund for every gallon I purchased back in 2005!

They can only do this if your government lets them.

Edit: in 2012 California tried to force Norinco to pay some sort of silly tax (California has MANY such taxes) and a rep from the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco came to Sacramento to explain that Norinco is a business arm of the People's Liberation Army and that, (and I love this part):



That's all the guy said before he stood up and left. Case closed.

If China can stand up to this idiocy so can Canada.

What I realy like about the 2000-2001 price spike in California was that it was caused almost compleatly by the deregulation that was suppost to make the market more efficent and lower costs.

This one ain't over by a long shot. The Commission is an administrative tribunal. This will go all teh way to teh Supremem Court becasue of the dollars involved.

It was also almost completely due to the corporate shenanigans of a handful of Texan grifters who were best buddies with the last Republican President Of The United States.

It was not true 'deregulation'. It was just the institution of a new form of regulation. Which, I might add, was the product of a Democrat-controlled legislature (AB 1890).

The legislation created the California Independent System Operator with the idea of creating a market that would allow California to buy electricity without building any new generating capacity. The heart of this was seen by the Democrats as a kind of environmental legislation because this measure prevented any new coal-fired electric plants from being built in California.

tl;dr version is that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

In any case, after the Cal ISO got raped by Enron the Democrats preferred to blame this on Gov. Pete Wilson (R) who signed the bill that they drafted and passed to his desk. They also recast AB 1890 as 'deregulation' because that was the leftist hate-word of the day even though AB 1890 was not at all a deregulation act. It was pure regulatory act in that it replaced a purely private trading system with a government managed trading system.

So why didn't electrical rates rise 900% all over the nation? Was their greed limited to just one state?

So why didn't electrical rates rise 900% all over the nation? Was their greed limited to just one state?

Only the starry-eyed Democrats in California thought this was a good idea. Remember, it was to help save the planet and all that rubbish and that's how they sold it at the time.

Here's the bill as it went to the Governor:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/95-96/bil ... d_sen.html

From a bill analysis you can see that this bill about electric regulation went into other spheres, as well:



Another analysis also sells the environmental benefits of this regulation:



See, if you call something 'green' then no end of idiots will get behind it without any question at all.

So why didn't electrical rates rise 900% all over the nation? Was their greed limited to just one state?

One wordof which California was the test bed for companies like Enron. Had they succeeded in screwing California without them ever catching on you can be sure the other deregulated states would have been next.

Have you ever seen the Documentary Enron the Smartest Guys in the Room? It pretty much explains how they manipulated the power in the state creating a false electricity shortage by diverting power to other states, shutting down power plants and creating rolling brownouts?

All because of deregulation and Gray Davis, but on the plus side they replaced Davis with the dumbest philandering action star on the planet who had tons of political experience.

So, after seeing who gets elected Governor in California, people like R. Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hayden, it might just be a case of Kharma giving California what it deserves but, that still doesn't mean BC should be financially reponsible for that states utter unregulated stupidity.