How the Californian Power Crisis went from financial to physical

I’m talking to Jim Bushnell, an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis – who was in New Zealand in August as the S. T. Lee fellow at the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation.

Last week, Jim started to explain what actually happened in the 2001 Californian electricity crisis. This week he talks about the counterintuitive blackouts they saw – even when there was surplus generation capacity available.

In August, Bushnell gave a lecture in Wellington asking If Electricity Liberalisation is So Great, why does everybody hate it?