The truth is anything but. Nevertheless, facts have never stopped elected officials, politically appointed regulators or consumer advocates as they try to elbow one another out of the way to be seen by consumers as their patron saint. But having said that, it never has been, nor does it need to be, a crisis for the state or for San Diego County. California will survive the current electrical bumps and grinds, but it may not survive the political fallout. The cornerstone of the problem, as Wood sees it, is that there haven't been any major power plants built in the state in more than a decade.
Wood wants to turn that around by mandating utility-built power plants.
Wood knows all too well that more than a dozen major generation plants are under construction or in the state's lethargic approval process right now. If, magically, they could all be built by next summer, California would be awash in electrons. Earlier this month, the governor set in motion work to streamline the siting process. At the same time, he and his colleagues in the Legislature for the past couple of years have stymied CPUC moves to step up the deregulation process for both natural gas and electricity. Most notably, Peace engineered a bipartisan rider in this year's budget bill that prevented the state's utilities from buying some of their power supplies outside the state-created power exchange.