FTL is not possible, but Dr. Jones proceeded to offer great insight with the words, "Just have to hope no one gets killed." He also said the plant will be shut down again soon, and should be running at full tilt again in January. He said there was a "whisper" that some generators were being turned off for periods of time today in an effort to alleviate stress on the grid. I hope that this means none of them will be off tomorrow. Tom Williams, director of the California Department of Water Resources said that it was to make sure that people have water, and the utilities had "not left the state of California at the mercy of generators." He said this crisis has revealed a "crisis of leadership in Sacramento, and the actions that are necessary have not been taken." This is no surprise to anyone who reads Hedge Fund Journal, but it is interesting to know that everyone on the scene considers water a 'commodity'. Governor Davis has said repeatedly that the State will ensure the water will be there, even if the Pacific Northwest and Arizona do not. Yesterday, the water level in the reservoirs were running at historic levels, not enough to run the hydro-electric dams, but enough to provide water to the core areas of California. It sounds to me like the utilities are buying water to keep the core going, and will then be able to sell back to the core at a higher price if this becomes an emergency situation. Mr. Williams said that with respect to the electricity generators, most are in voluntary long-term contracts to sell electricity into the state. "Therefore they have made an investment and when there is no guarantee of payment we are concerned that they will just take the system down, and I don't think that's good for anyone." The best way to get the generators to continue selling power is to pay them, and "that's going to require the Department of Water Resources." He continued to say that "people can sue if they think we have over-charged them, and that is what makes this so very difficult. We cannot negotiate on behalf of the people of California in saying what they should pay for the electricity they consume." He concluded by saying that he and his department were committed to keeping the utilities and the lights on, but he could not do it without funding. Therefore, he needs help from all three levels of government in order to do his job, "and to make sure everyone else in the state gets their fair share of water." Mr. Williams continued, "if we were to use a 'rolling blackout,' which the Governor has been advocating as some kind of tool for controlling demand, the effect would be to put the power companies in control, because the power companies would call first." Mr. Williams also said that he is 'concerned' that Governor Davis does not understand the flow of electricity and what determines the price. He said that someone from Enron came to talk to him recently, and said they can supply the state with power at 5 or even 3 cents a kilowatt, and someone from the Department of Water Resources said that 5 cents is too expensive. The state has been spending around $50 million per day. He concluded by saying that, the public and the investors are the top priority in his department. The CA ISO made some interesting comments yesterday, and then received criticism from one of their board members, Terry Winter, who resigned, saying the organization is not doing enough to help alleviate the situation. From a transcript of a press conference: $600 million, we know, has been lost in the past two days of trading, as consumers and others that are interested, the marketplace is taking a $600 million loss in the past two days. And in the past year that the ISO has been in operation, customers have paid $6 billion in excess energy charges. These two together with the fact that only 33% of the state has been selected by the ISO as an initial participant, and that there is a total of 50,000 to choose from is another of the reasons for potential bankruptcy. But we're doing the best we can, with the limited resources that are available. Yesterday we had a $1.5 million loss in the procurement department, and we also have to remember that not all of our power is purchased, an average of 30% is self-supplied. So it really varies, depending on the hour, depending on the day, and with a $20.7 billion dollar deficit, and a record level of $6 billion for the last 12 months in the market charges, there is tremendous pressure on the resources that we have. We are doing our best to keep it as stable as we can, while keeping people informed and making announcements, and that's what we have been doing. The problem is that there are not any resources out there that can bring quick relief. We're talking about 2 to 2.5 million megawatts of demand that's out there. So just because we get people to change demand doesn't mean the problem goes away, because what has happened is that the suppliers of those resources have been calling off their blocks. And so what we have been doing is what's been described earlier, and it's the same thing we did a year ago when we were calling for voluntary conservation, which is that we've asked that people turn off any nonessential lighting and asked that people think about turning off any equipment that is not absolutely essential. If we look at how many people have switched back on in the past day since we've had to have voluntary interruptions we've seen a resurgence of voluntary cutbacks, we've had over 120,000 reports of voluntary cutbacks. That was reported just earlier today. The other thing we have done is to engage our largest industrial customers to ask them to use the energy that they use to reduce consumption during this peak period. But the problem is there's no quick fix. And this really has been a test of the system in terms of generating resources. But one of the things we have to be clear about, is that as we try to use creative means to get the supply side, on the wholesale side of the market, we are not seeing the consumers, and I'm including those that were in this so-called gap. We're not seeing them curtail their use of electricity. Quite the contrary, they're using more than they did last year at this time. It's hard for us to bring on new generators to try to meet this load, when the same load is still going up. Yesterday we saw significant upward spikes in loads in San Diego and Los Angeles that we had not seen previously. We saw them trying to switch over to using natural gas and at the same time trying to burn more oil. We have increased reserves of oil and natural gas by 5% from a year ago. But the demand continues to go up faster than those supplies can come in. As for the public and business customers, we have to really find a way to reach out to them, in a clear and focused way, and to tell them, you know, that there is going to be significant costs, and that we've had significant costs already. For those of you that aren't on online, and we understand not everyone can be on, it would be wonderful if you could spend an extra 10 minutes tomorrow morning to try to call your office and work and other people in your office. What we're finding, that we haven't quite seen in terms of residential usage, we have more outages and outages are lasting longer. So the consumer has to look at what they have available, and the consumer is going to have to have the ability to change their habits somewhat. Yesterday it was not unusual to see the San Diego area peak at over 100% of its available capacity. Even on the so-called in-state generation we've been able to bring in, it was insufficient. So we have now requested voluntary cutbacks from the in-state generation for next week. It's already late. The state called for voluntary cutbacks for all in-state power generators for next week. And finally, on a more positive note, we've got to recognize that consumers are conserving where they can. I'm told by one of our members that he had been able to meet with a lot of our members this morning to discuss conservation. And in fact, we have no reports of rotating outages that would seem to indicate that consumers are not conserving, and I think the last time that we had rotating outages in this state was the darkest day in Los Angeles history. So at least our consumers do have a lot of potential to conserve. Now the challenge is that even if we're able to reduce peak demand somewhat, what we're saying to consumers is if we don't do this, there are going to be significant costs incurred by the state. And they're going to have to find an alternative and the only alternative that we have is to see consumers curtail their loads. We've already lost one load this morning due to planned plant maintenance that did occur, but we can expect others as well. Today, the most likely thing we would see is perhaps some plants not having their load come on as early as usual