In July 2001, just a month after I was hired by Newsday and assigned to the utilities beat, the Long Island Power Authority, or LIPA, announced that it had to build new power plants across the island because increasing demand by residents and businesses would soon surpass the available supply.
Talking to experts about the issue, I learned that utilities in the Northeast typically have plenty of kilowatts to go around on all but the hottest days of the year when air conditioners cause huge spikes in demand. I was curious about changes in demand on LIPA's system over time, so I asked the utility for three years' worth of hourly readings in electronic format.
The chief spokesman looked at me like I was from Mars (the authority had never been asked for electronic data before), but he ultimately gave me a disk with 26,000 records in fixed-width ASCII format along with an utterly pointless 500-page printout of the same data.
My resulting story documented that demand on LIPA's system, which then had a maximum capacity of 4,600 megawatts, had exceeded 4,000 megawatts during just 16 hours in the previous year. The data allowed me to explain to readers that new power plants, always unpopular with residents, wouldn't be needed if the utility and its customers could find ways to cut electric usage during those few peak hours.
Throughout the ensuing years on the beat, I would turn to databases and public documents from countless sources to fact-check industry officials and investigate a wide range of issues, from fuel costs and pollution to utility salaries and the impact of deregulation on the energy industry.
In fact, few beats have more data and public documents readily available to the reporter who knows where to find them and – this is the hard part – how to decipher the incredibly arcane terminology of the industry.
Deregulation tangle
Untangling the inner workings of electric utilities got that much harder after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission prodded many states to deregulate their utilities. Deregulation involved breaking up the electric monopolies that historically owned every piece of the systems – the power plants, the high-voltage transmission lines that move the juice over long distances and the low-voltage distribution circuits that feed kilowatts to users.
In states where deregulation took hold, the utilities sold their generating plants to independent power producers while keeping the wires. Those producers then competed to sell electricity to the utilities and large industrial customers. Middlemen – energy marketers and traders – began buying and selling electricity like a commodity in what were essentially spot markets.
Of course, Enron became the most infamous player in this new world and its 2001 collapse sent shockwaves through the industry. In California, energy deregulation led to rolling blackouts and billions in costs to ratepayers. Many states that had considered deregulation backed off.
In New York, where LIPA operates, deregulation led to what I considered one of the best stories of my tenure on the beat. The state's largest utility, Consolidated Edison, had sold its power plants as part of deregulation. Its customers in New York City and Westchester County were now dependent on those independent power producers for their electricity.
I learned through regulatory filings that Con Ed was paying a fortune to keep some of those independent producers on standby – plants that would only run during emergencies. These were called