Re: [gentoo-dev] power outage

[Philippe Namias]

On Wednesday 21 March 2001 17:26, you wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 01:57:31PM +0100, Philippe Namias wrote:
> > Here in France we don't have any electricity/gas problem as it's a state
> > company. They have the monopole so there is no choice here but i only
> > paid 42$ by month for electricity.
>
> In principle and practice, there is nothing wrong with electricity being
> provided by private companies.

I agree with you the principe of concurrency is good for the market/consummer 
so i hope they will be soon other electricity company in France .
But what i don't understand it's why the electricity company didn't ring the 
bell sooner.
I think that this kind of company are able to predict in a certain way the 
volume of electricity needed , so why they don't alert the State Of 
California of this. 
Because now if they are allowed (in Calofornia or any state close to) to 
build a power plant it will take years to build.
So i think that your are just at the beginning of the problem?

PS: If you want candle i can send you:)


> The problem in California was due to poor
> government regulations.  Here's my understanding of what went wrong:
>
> The state of California passed a law that the electric companies can charge
> no more than X dollars per kW (no exceptions).  Of course, this seems like
> a good idea because it appears to protect consumers.  But then, the cost of
> *producing* the electricity rose to above this amount.  This happened
> because it is nearly impossible to build a new power plant in California
> due to environmental regulations.  So even though California uses more
> power every year, they were unable to expand their production capacity to
> meet demand.  It gets worse.
>
> Due to the price limit on electricity, the utilities couldn't pass the
> additional expense to the Californian consumer.  By law, they had to charge
> X dollars per kW, which meant that they were *losing* money.  So, they
> tried to borrow money to to maintain their power supplies and even attempt
> to build new ones, but no one would lend them money (since the loan people
> knew that the utilities were in a no-win situation).  So, by law,
> California was forced to buy tons of gas and electricity from neighboring
> states, dramatically raising the cost of electricity and gas in the
> southwest.
>
> Again, there's no problem with private utilities.  Competition will keep
> the price low, usually much lower than government-run utilities.  The
> problem is when the government sets up impossible-to-follow rules for the
> utilities without understanding the consequences.  Then, the utilties are
> forced to do stupid things (by law) and things like this happen.
>
> It's as if I asked you to create new ebuilds, but I insisted that you
> couldn't use your hands because you might get a repetive stress injury.  To
> the uninformed, this sounds like a good rule (protecting you from harm),
> but in practice it means you need to type with your toes!
>
> Best Regards,