Sounding board -- Roy B. Woolsey

I laugh all the way to the bank when I think of the alleged consumer

advocates’ attack on utilities, which are the victims, not the cause, of

our power crisis.

I receive a royalty for electricity generated from geothermal steam.

It is now more than three times the amount I received during January and

February of 1999.

The cost per kilowatt hour purchased by Southern California Edison is

more than it charges its customers. It does not take much brains for an

honest man to see that this is unfair and won’t continue for long.

The majority’s willingness to cheat a minority is a weakness of

democracy, which establishes the value of our constitutional prohibition

against denial of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

One cause of our crisis is high oil and gas prices. The solution

requires production of more fuel and/or development of alternative

sources of power.

A short-term Band-Aid could be oil and gas price controls. But that

would reduce the incentive to drill and keep the price up in the long

run.

We need a state and national energy policy that will encourage oil and

gas production and development of sound alternatives.

Another cause is lack of capacity to generate the needed electricity.

Edison used only private funds for its generation at Edison, Florence,

Huntington and Shaver Lake.

Los Angeles took part of Edison’s distribution system and gets power

from the Hoover Dam at less than adequate return on the taxpayers’

investment.

Generators are not a good investment because of the unfriendly

business atmosphere, particularly in California, and the prospect of

arbitrary price controls, taxes and other regulations.

Former Vice President Al Gore’s frequent jabs at big business did not

help.

We will never know if deregulation of the utilities would have worked

had the price of fuel and demand for electricity not risen so

dramatically and gas generation capacity increased.

* ROY B. WOOLSEY is a Newport Beach resident.