Investors sent the parent company's shares tumbling. Analysts said the default was also a bargaining ploy by Edison, which has lost billions paying more for wholesale electricity than it can charge its customers and desperately wants reluctant state officials to bail it out. This has become a game of chicken that is just astounding,'' said Lori Woodland, an analyst at Fitch, another debt-rating agency. I think it's a feint intended to pressure lawmakers into passing the bailout legislation,'' said Harvey Rosenfield at the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. In a bankruptcy, the big risk is that the state loses control,'' said Brian Youngberg, who follows Edison for securities firm Edward Jones.
Demand is likely to continue to be heavy in Southern California over the next few days.
The National Weather Service posted frost warnings for Wednesday night in the Inland Empire, all the way to the Orange County border. In its regulatory filing Tuesday, Edison International also said it was postponing the release of its fourth-quarter earnings. The company also said it was working to isolate'' its profitable Mission Energy unit in the event of a bankruptcy by erecting additional corporate fire walls between the troubled utility and Mission Energy, which owns generating plants outside California. Meanwhile, Edison's cost- cutting measures were particularly felt by 11 customers in Newport Beach. They spent Tuesday night without power because the utility was waiting until this morning to respond to the outage, which was caused by a transformer failure, Edison said.