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Très Riches Heures

 

How to price energy during a stage 3 alert?

You know the painting. Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. You probably saw it first in Janson's "History of Art", in a college survey course.

It's a flat landscape, rather devoid of perspective. Peasants toil in a field before a huge ivory-tower castle. It's one of a series of 12 medieval calendar scenes, representing the liturgical book of hours, believed to have been painted by the Limbourg brothers Paul, Hermann, and Jean, sometime between 1412 and 1416, on commission for Jean, Duc de Berry, a noted art lover in 15th century France.

Now jump forward a six centuries, to the very generous hours of California's power market. Lacking much evidence of wrongful conduct by power producers, but generally feeling ripped off, when should regulators limit power prices?

(A) All the time, since markets have gone haywire pretty much around the clock, or

(B) Only in certain hours, when prices become exceedingly , and when the California Independent System Operator (ISO) finds it necessary to declare a "stage 3 alert," which it does whenever the available power supplies drop so low as to exceed customer demand by a bare margin of only 1.5 percent?