As far back as August 2000, Gray Davis was correctly placing blame on the deregulation of energy markets for the state’s power woes :

The crisis has spurred demands for a repeal of a complex 1996 state law that sought to boost competition in the state’s $20 billion electrical power industry, then pass on the expected savings to customers.

Under deregulation, private utilities were required to sell off their power plants and open their markets to electrical resellers, and buy power on the open market, paying an amount that may fluctuate from day to day. For some customers served by San Diego Gas and Electric Co., however, that has meant bills 200 percent higher than what they’re used to paying.

A report prepared by the state’s utility commission staff for California Gov. Gray Davis stopped short of recommending that the new system be dismantled. But the 40-page study was sharply critical of deregulation, and predicted dire troubles to come.

Almost a year later, when the energy crisis was at its peak, Davis rebuked the callousness of the Bush Administration’s stance :

Last week, Cheney said conservation is a “sign of personal virtue” but not a sufficient basis for a “sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

Davis said the new administration has “helped us on every matter I have asked, except for the biggest” — helping reduce wholesale electricity prices, which he said increased by 450 percent from 1999 to 2000.

“We need help from Washington today to reduce the extraordinary prices for power we are paying,” he said. “The product isn’t any better. We aren’t using any more electrons. It’s just Texas and Southwest energy companies charging outrageous prices to our utilities that eventually get passed onto our customers.”

An when all was said and done, Gray Davis was right and the Bush Administration was dead wrong :

A former top energy trader, considered the mastermind of Enron Corp.’s scheme to drive up California’s energy prices, pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal conspiracy charge.

Timothy Belden, the former head of trading in Enron’s Portland, Ore., office, admitted to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and promised to cooperate with state and federal prosecutors as well as any non-criminal effort to investigate the energy industry.

“I did it because I was trying to maximize profit for Enron,” Belden told U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins.

It’s been almost a year and now we find ourselves stuck in a situation where the state economy is in the dumps and Gray Davis is facing a possible recall. As Scott Rosenberg points out, maybe it’s time to revisit the energy crisis :

There is an unfolding story in California that your newspaper will typically cover as two separate stories. One story is a tale of budgetary woe, in which the state, suffering under a tenacious recession and stymied by its own political logjams, struggles to figure out how to close a gap of many billions of dollars in its budget. If it can’t, we Californians will discover very quickly that just as the federal government cuts our taxes (a little bit if we’re middle class, a lot if we’re rich), the state will either raise our taxes or cut our services and schools (or, if we’re really lucky, both).

This is a big story. Meanwhile, in the other story, the state of California tries to persuade federal energy regulators that it should be able to abrogate exorbitant energy contracts it signed at the height of the energy crunch in 2001. It is now a matter of public record, established by those same federal energy regulators, that California’s energy prices jumped through the ceiling because energy companies were illegally manipulating the deregulated market. (Though at the time the much-reviled Gov. Gray Davis was sneered at for suggesting as much, his claims were dead right.) But, strangely, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which thinks those prices were illegal enough to be bringing “enforcement actions” against 60 energy companies for gaming the California energy market, nonetheless thinks that they are still legal enough that the state — and citizens — of California should have to pay them.

In short, we’re broke partially because of a power crisis that Gray Davis did everything in his power to prevent. I don’t know about you, but I’m glad that our governor is willing to stand up to the Bush administration. So few politicians seem willing to do that lately.