Bob Filner: “We are supposed to have 20,000 megawatt surplus. Well, somehow all of the plants at once were shut down. They had…”

“We are supposed to have 20,000 megawatt surplus. Well, somehow all of the plants at once were shut down. They had maintenance problems or other problems. Or, and this is why I say it is a price problem, not just a supply problem, they could not get paid by the utilities for their electricity so they just shut down. Mr. Speaker, this is not the promise of deregulation. This is the fact of a manipulated market, that we have blackouts. You know what happened in San Diego, a day's blackout, we had near fatalities at traffic intersections because the traffic lights do not work. We had near fatalities because elevators shut down. And the threat of blackouts means that people cannot have any orderly budget or orderly future, so they were thinking of leaving California. A blackout for a few hours in certain industries means millions of lost inventory and production. So blackouts maybe for an hour or for a day and maybe only once or twice during the winter, but they are catastrophic; and we are looking at the possibility of 30 or more days of blackouts in California for the coming summer.”