The Department of Energy (DOE) recently released a report that indicates that proposed wholesale electricity price controls in California could double the number of rolling blackouts from 113 to 235 hours and increase the number of households in the dark to about 1.575 million.
The report, “The Impact of Wholesale Electricity Price Controls on California Summer Reliability,” was prepared by the department’s Office of Policy at the request of U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska). It evaluates the probable effect of two alternative price cap proposals and concludes that they “are likely to increase the number of hours and the magnitude of the outages that California will experience.”