San Diego Gas & Electric Co. still has its ace in the hole after the federal government said Thursday that designated energy corridors on the west and east coasts will remain in place.
Widely anticipated, the decision means SDG&E can play that ace in the event the California Public Utilities Commission refuses next summer to approve its $1.3 billion, 500-kilovolt Sunrise Powerlink transmission line.
The energy agency said its review found plenty of evidence to support its earlier conclusion that bottlenecks in Southern California's power grid threaten to prevent enough electricity from reaching homes during times of heavy use, such as hot summer days.
The Federal Energy Commision still refuses to acknowledge the role played by market manipulation in the brownouts of 2001 in California. Indeed, even as an appellate court found SDG&E's parent company, Sempra Energy, guilty (along with Enron) of gross criminal conduct,
Commenting on the green light for trial against Sempra, Thomas V. Girardi, a lead plaintiffs' attorney with Girardi & Keese in Los Angeles, stated: "After four years of the Sempra defendants' desperately trying to avoid the day of reckoning, we are eager to have a jury of Californians pass judgment on the egregious behavior and schemes by these companies who preyed on the vulnerability of every person and business in California.
"The California energy crisis in 2000-2001 was no accident," Girardi added. "These greedy defendants manipulated the market shamelessly to gouge Californians. The world's fifth-largest economy was literally brought to its knees. The defendants' actions went far beyond aggravating the energy crisis - they effectively caused it and, in so doing, picked the pockets of every one of us."
The evidence against Sempra reveals a clandestine meeting held in a Phoenix, Arizona Embassy Suites hotel room in September 1996 where 11 senior executives (including two presidents) from SoCalGas, SDG&E and El Paso met without any legal counsel present and agreed that they would cooperate rather than compete with each other in supplying and delivering natural gas. The net result of this unlawful agreement was to enable them to artificially constrain the supply of natural gas to California and to escalate the price of gas and ultimately electricity produced from natural gas. The lawsuit maintains that these acts were the major cause of the state's energy crisis in 2000-2001.
The bottleneck that the FERC cites as reason for the powerlink, was blatant market manipulation. Now Sempra wants to build a transmission line in order to bring in power from Texas and Mexico as it sees fit.
The California Public Utilities Commission is aware of the game, but Sempra has powerful backers in Washington for its continued rape of California rate-payers. In order to do this, the Federal Energy Commission has usurped what was once an exclusive right of states, i.e. to manage its own electric grid.
Sempra Energy Resources has built a $350 million, 600MW power plant near Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. The new Termoeléctrica de Mexicali is a combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power station. It has two gas turbines, a steam turbine and a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG). The plant is connected to the US electric grid via a new, 230kV transmission line. The power plant was completed in July 2003.
The plant was built ten miles west of Mexicali, three miles from the border, and is believed to be the first in Mexico to be fully owned and operated by a foreign corporation. Previously, facilities built and operated by private firms were owned by the Mexican government's Federal Electricity Commission.Environmental group Greenpeace has claimed that Sempra Energy Corp. is changing the border region into a "dirty energy export zone." California has strict air and water standards, and Greenpeace accuses the company of building in Mexico to avoid these laws. Greenpeace accused Sempra of unethical practices like high pricing and pollution, and also condemned President Bush in the US and Vicente Fox in Mexico for accelerating the border region's development.
Under the pretext of building solar and wind plants in the Arizona desert, Sempra has all of the pieces in place for a vertical integrated matket, beginning with its Liquified Natural Gas terminal thirty miles south of Ensenada, far from the coastal regulations of the State of California.