Maria Cantwell: “what are these schemes that were perpetrated on ratepayers in the West? Get Shorty is a scheme that individuals may have…”

“what are these schemes that were perpetrated on ratepayers in the West? Get Shorty is a scheme that individuals may have read about in the paper, or maybe some individuals know from being in California or hearing parts of what happened in Washington State or Oregon. I thought it was the title of a movie. I did not know it was a clever marketing tool presented by a bunch of executives at an energy company to manipulate the prices so my ratepayers might pay more. I could not believe something like that would happen. Another scheme that was part of the process is Load Shift, another way in which the individual consumer did not understand that some trading was going on with the price, and yet prices could be inflated and because, again, we had a shortage and had to go out and buy on the spot market, we were trapped at buying at that high rate. There is another attempt to defraud consumers known as the Silver Peak Incident.”