Power-Market Flaws Hid California Crisis That Ended In Blackouts
- State report says convergence bidding ‘masked tight supply’
- CAISO temporarily shut convergence market after outages
A power substation in Calexico, California.
Photographer: Bing Guan/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
California officials have confirmed what most people already suspected about the blackouts that plunged nearly 2 million people into darkness in August: Climate change played a role. So did the state’s poor planning in its aggressive push away from fossil fuels.
But for the first time on Tuesday they acknowledged that flaws in the state’s power markets also contributed to the rolling outages -- the first since the Enron-era energy crisis of 2001.