The California electricity crisis of 2000-01 is a lesson to other jurisdictions
that notions of the lack of usefulness of an investment can be distorted by the
limits of one's personal experience and the limits of the institutional memory of a
regulatory body. Only a few years earlier, few if any consumers or regulators of
electricity in the United States would have considered it likely that California
energy users would face shortages associated with spiking prices in the
wholesale power market. Investments in "excess" generation and transmission
capacity might have appeared before the summer of 2000 not to be used and
useful any longer in a restructured electricity market. Yet events suddenly proved
excess capacity to be currently and unquestionably used and useful. A utility's
investment in seemingly "excess" capacity provides an immediate option to
consumers, an option having substantial economic value if demand unexpectedly
surges, supply unexpectedly collapses, or both occur simultaneously. That option
is analogous to insurance. It is especially true for an outlier event like the
California electricity crisis that insurance confers its greatest advantage upon the
insured that are the very consumers whom public utility regulation exists to
protect.