Our situation was quite different from that in the East. The outages we had were controlled – so-called rolling outages that were for short, predictable periods of time. In the East it was a complete system failure. Hearings on the cause of that failure began earlier this month.

In 2001, California had power, but transmission was inadequate. The connections between the northern half of the state and the south were too weak. Everyone knew that the crisis was coming. The signs were all there and everyone knew where the outages were most likely to occur.

Until recently, California had not built any major new power plants in more than 20 years. As we grew, we became more dependent on power markets. Hence the need for those transmission lines.

No. The state’s deregulation law was a political compromise that disregarded the basic economics of the industry. Deregulation replaces utilities with markets, but California’s problems were inadequate supply, growing demand and bottlenecked transmission. For its mistakes, California now has a legacy of high prices, but elsewhere markets are functioning well. Nationally, the real price of delivered power has fallen nearly 30 percent in the last 10 years, and we can credit a lot of that to the market. Other people have choices and are using them – 25 percent of all the households in Pittsburgh have found better bargains than their old utility.

State electricity regulation in effect allows governments to tax and subsidize different power users and environmental interests without the need for legislation. State regulators have lots of friends in Congress, and my bet is that the emerging energy bill will not make the needed changes. But without those changes, all the legislation in the world will add very few new wires to the system.