There were a number of head-shaking oddities in Gov. Gray Davis' statewide televised speech last week -- the one in which he more or less, sort of, kind of shouldered some responsibility for some of California's recent woes.

One of them was Davis' attempt to take credit for California's not having power blackouts when Eastern states were going dark.

"Last Friday, 50 million Americans lost electricity for 29 hours. In California, not a single light has gone out for the last two and a half years," Davis said as part of his defense on energy policy.
Polls indicate that voter unhappiness with Davis' handling of the 2001 energy crisis is a major driver of the Davis recall election on Oct. 7.

In Davis' version of events, he and the state were the victims of rapacious energy traders and he handled the situation as best he could, protecting Californians from massive blackouts as energy prices soared and utilities' ability to purchase power vanished.

There is a legitimate debate over what Davis could have done earlier in the crisis -- but independent experts fault him for not moving more decisively on authorizing long-term supply contracts before prices spiked dangerously high.

The Democratic governor's cryptic comment about no lights going out in California referred to his contention that he has fast-tracked power plant construction in the state to avoid future shortages of juice. In fact, the blackouts that struck the eastern United States and Canada had nothing to do with the amount of power being generated, but rather were caused by a breakdown in the regional transmission system. And transmission bottlenecks, particularly between the northern and southern regions of California, remain a major threat to the state's energy security.

What happened in the East and Davis' self-serving remarks are reminders that two years after California experienced its energy crisis, the state still has not adopted a replacement for the discredited (and misnamed) "deregulation" system that was enacted in 1996 and whose illogical provisions led directly to the California imbroglio.

While the 1996 scheme, with its quasi-market-driven pricing of power, has been abandoned, we have been left with a hodgepodge of regulated and nonregulated power supplies, long-term contracts that are draining billions of dollars from consumers' pockets, and -- most of all -- no rational and clearly defined apparatus for generating, transmitting, distributing and pricing this vital commodity.

Democratic legislators, led by Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, wrote what they claimed was a comprehensive new scheme, or actually an old scheme this year. It would have more or less returned California to the pre-1996 status of tight regulation by the Public Utilities Commission, but as with the 1996 legislation, the devil was in the details. Dunn & Co. included so many provisions in their legislation that were designed to help specific interest groups that their fellow Democrats began to get nervous about voting for it. Politicians who had voted for the 1996 legislation had been burned badly for not understanding what they were doing, and the current crop didn't want a repeat.

Unringing the bell is difficult, bordering on impossible. Even the Dunn bill could not undo aspects of the post-1996 situation that are encased in legal and financial concrete, and it's unclear whether the better aspects of deregulation, such as allowing large power users to acquire their own long-term supplies, could survive.

Davis, meanwhile, has exhibited little interest in working with the Legislature to create some kind of energy policy that could stand the test of time. He has confined himself to shifting blame to others, even if it means rewriting history, and trying to extract the state -- and himself -- from those high-priced, long-term contracts that he was so proud of negotiating in 2001.

California is as fundamentally vulnerable to another energy crisis now as it was two or three years ago. We still lack sufficient generating capacity, and our transmission grid problems have yet to be resolved. And neither of these problems will be solved until those who must invest money in new power plants and new high-voltage lines know what they can expect from California authorities.