LA Dept of Water and Power To Sell Off The Golden Egg

[ilbegone]

Villaraigosa's astounding willful ignorance and determination to push on despite all the facts beating him about the head and shoulders is unbelievable.

His city is broke, I believe his falling apart utility is the only significant contributor to city revenue left, and Villaraigosa and his city council play the part of lemmings in a mad tragicomedy about rates, money transfers, sell offs, lease backs, and "green power" as well as meddling in Arizona's affairs.

I understand DWP has bewildering array of perhaps the lowest electrical rates for housing in the country, and I believe certainly so when compared to neighboring utilities and municipalities.

I have no idea of what the figures are now, but I recall that 20 years ago Edison was required to buy alternative (green) energy at the highest avoided cost of constructing new generation facilities, which I believe was something as preposterous as 4 or even more to 1.

The investor owned utilities were forced to sell off generation capacity by out of touch state politicians in Sacramento who believed that deregulation would force "competition" and lower rates, but all that was accomplished was pulling down the collective pants of Californians who were raped unmercifully by out of state carpetbagger power brokers while FERC gleefully stood by and watched.

That melt down is a large part of why we have our state budget deficit problems now - goofy f-ing politicians thought they would break the utilities by forcing them to buy power high and sell it low, but the utilities shoved it back on the politicians - PG&E by heading towards bankruptcy court and Edison by shifting its capital to legally separate subsidiaries (out of reach of legislative jack asses) and telling the state that it had to finance the over cost from then on or the lights were going off.

I believe that when Edison was forced to divest its generation facilities, the dogs were sold to out of state jackals and profitable facilities were spun off to legally separate subsidiaries.

In the meantime, DWP - a governmental municipality rather than a corporation such as SCE and not forced to divest its generation - made a killing selling overpriced power to the state.

Ok, off my soap box.

[ilbegone]

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is considering selling off its headquarters, shares in out-of-state power supplies and other assets instead of raising customer rates.

I don't believe it is the DWP so much as those running the city.

There is a lot of political pressure against raising rates, and in that vein Beutner (temporary head of DWP who's an investor and never has been a part of any utility operation) said something to the effect that DWP could afford to own its offices or it could afford to buy green power, but not both.

And he didn't care which - those were the choices.