The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

What nobody involved with crafting ISO4 or the tax credits that accompanied it had expected was how well it all might go. Doing anything new in relationship to the bulk energy game had for so long been impossible that the best these new energy entrepreneurs and ideologues had hoped for was to make a tiny dent in the existing edifice. What they got instead was a party that everybody (even people they hadn’t exactly invited) came to. Taken together, ISO4 and the state’s overly generous tax credits created a glut in the renewables market. And as oil and natural gas prices plummeted in the mid-1980s, California’s two big utilities were quite suddenly being required to purchase more power than they needed for far more money than they could recoup through their rates. Meanwhile, the Reagan-era deregulation of the savings and loans in 1986 took Cashman, and most everyone else, totally by surprise. Suddenly everyone, not just the superrich—“the baseball players, football players, plastic surgeons and Southern California actors” that Cashman’s turbine investment plan had been meant to attract—could secure the financing necessary to buy their very own personal wind turbine. Far too many people, in his opinion, did just that.