Right or wrong, the five-year-old perception that Enron Corp. caused California’s energy crisis in 2000-2001 remains fixed in the collective mind of the nation’s most populous state, and the reaction Thursday to the guilty verdicts against Enron’s two former leaders for the most part was that justice had been done, but the state’s electricity consumers continue to pay for the former executives’ misdeeds.

The Los Angeles Times tracked down former governor Gray Davis, and the man who was recalled in 2003 mostly because of the political fallout from the energy meltdown, called the verdicts “”not pure justice, but poetic justice.” Davis told the LA Times he now hopes that both men go to jail.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who in the midst of the energy crisis was quoted as hoping former CEO Ken Lay would wind up behind bars, said Thursday he hoped the verdicts would deter future corporate crime and encourage other CEOs to put “ethics ahead of profits.” Lockyer’s office has led an effort that resulted in a $1.52 billion settlement with Enron, and he had brought numerous other energy crisis-related lawsuits that have resulted in several billions of dollars more in settlements with major energy suppliers.

S. David Freeman, the former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and an advisor to the former governor in the midst of the crisis, told the Times he didn’t think the verdicts were “vengeance for California” as much as they were “justice.”

Gary Ackerman, head of the Western Power Trading Forum (WPTF), of which Enron was once a member, told news media the verdicts only “partially close an ugly chapter” in the power industry, noting that Enron’s demise caused a lot of the WPTF members to close their businesses. He reiterated that contrary to the common perception, Enron’s actions did not cause electricity prices to soar — an acute supply-demand imbalance did that.

The shortages of supply, however, were exacerbated by Enron’s corporate leaders, according to state Sen. Joe Dunn, who headed a two-year special investigative committee looking at what caused power prices to skyrocket during the period. In campaigning for the state Controller’s office now, Dunn is emphasizing his record investigating Enron, although his investigative committee never published a report and never directly substantiated any of the many accusations of wrongdoing that were raised in the committee’s two-year series of committee hearings.

Regardless of the degree to which Enron — then led by Lay and Jeffrey Skilling — caused California’s woes, it is undeniable that California’s retail electricity rates were much lower and the push for market-based competition in the electricity industry was much more accepted prior to the crisis. For example, an average monthly residential electric bill at Southern California Edison Co. was $58 in early 2000 and now is more than $85. The state was several years into phasing in a deregulated, or “restructured” electricity market with retail customer choice in 2000, and today most of that structure has been dismantled and the trend is toward a more hybrid market with traditional regulation.

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