Governor says FERC 'blew it' on Calif. mitigation order

California Governor Gray Davis Thursday criticized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Wednesday order establishing a monitoring and mitigation plan for the state's volatile electricity market, saying the commission "had a chance to bring meaningful relief to California's outrageous wholesale prices and they blew it." In a statement, Davis added that "it makes no sense whatsoever to condition the twelve months of relief proposed by [FERC] to California's willingness to join a regional organization that under the best of circumstances cannot be functional for another eighteen months. "Last summer, the federal government found that wholesale prices were unjust and unreasonable. They have yet to enforce their finding."
In an interview Thursday with CNN, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who earlier this week introduced a bill that would require FERC to caps wholesale power prices, said the commission's plan for her state was "fraught with problems, but is better than nothing at all." She predicted that California will not be the only part of the country to experience electricity problems this summer and said New York, parts of the Midwest and other parts of the Western US could be in a similar situation. "This is a crisis that could well be a disaster," she said.

platts.com