From the The New York Times. More from the Enron file, you know the company headed by "Kenny Boy." Fine upstanding company. Good friends with Georgie et al. The kind of folks we should be investing our "personal accounts" with.

In one January 2001 telephone tape of an Enron trader the public utility identified as Bill Williams and a Las Vegas energy official identified only as Rich, an agreement was made to shut down a power plant providing energy to California. The shutdown was set for an afternoon of peak energy demand.

'This is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing,' Mr. Williams says on the tape. 'We want you guys to get a little creative and come up with a reason to go down.' After agreeing to take the plant down, the Nevada official questioned the reason. 'O.K., so we're just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type of thing?' Rich asks. 'And that's cool?'

'Hopefully,' Mr. Williams says, before both men laugh.

The next day, Jan. 17, 2001, as the plant was taken out of service, the State of California called a power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit up to a half-million consumers, according to daily logs of the western power grid.

Of course at the time Kenny Boy dismissed claims that Enron was manipulating the market as nothing more than "conspiracy theories." Keep in mind these are the guys who helped to draft the Bush energy "plan" that Georgie urged Congress to pass in his SotU address.
posted by Idle Crank at 2/04/2005 01:54:00 AM