Arnold's Energy Script Needs a Power Bar

Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger's high-powered Hollywood PR machine, no one on his campaign team will speak about his energy policy or even say who is working on the matter. Former governor Pete Wilson and members of his inner circle are among those known to be coaching, but his media office did not know who was advising the modern-day power juicer on energy issues.

Also silent on the all-important power-policy-to-be is the Governor-elect. "Have you ever heard him talk about his energy policy?" asked one Capitol insider.

The campaign's website does lay out a six-point energy plan for the state, but it is hardly bulging with details. Its stated goals include boosting private investment in power plant and transmission projects, renegotiating the state's renegotiated long-term power contracts, and significantly boosting renewable energy supplies.

Some praised the energy outline as progressive, while others shredded it for lacking originality and/or being full of unrealistic promises.

The Independent Energy Producers welcomed Schwarzenegger's six-point plan. "It is a forward-looking document," said Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of the association of non-utility electricity generators that include many using renewable resources. He noted it was not a "radical departure from an orderly direction we are heading in" but was a good sign the Governor-elect wanted to learn from restructuring schemes in Texas and other states and to increase the supply of green power.

One source said the plan "looks like the IEP platform." Smutny-Jones replied that the association's energy plan was floating around and just could have ended up next to one of Schwarzenegger's hefty dumbbells. "It is possible he read it between takes of Terminator 3."

For California State Senator Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana), "It is a pie-in-the-sky wish list by the folks trying to save the failed deregulation plan." Dunn did not disagree with many of the points raised in Schwarzenegger's online document and supported the proposition requiring utilities to boost their renewable power supplies to 33 percent by 2020. But achieving that goal, according to Dunn, would require Schwarzenegger "to take on his political friends in the wholesale energy market" -- including those at Duke, Dynegy, and Mirant.

In spite of Schwarzenegger's quick rise to political power, he faces some potential land mines. Besides the whopping state budget, there is also the looming issue of what went on during his May 2001 meeting with Kenneth Lay, head of scandalous and bankrupt Enron. Recently released Enron emails noted Schwarzenegger was among those who met with Lay, a key deregulation mover and shaker, in a Beverly Hills hotel room in the midst of the state's energy market turmoil.

A May 11, 2001, email to Lay from an Enron employee states, "Explain about our comprehensive solution. . . . We'd like to position this meeting as an insider's conversation of what's going on with the energy situation." Muckraking journalist Greg Palast in a recent article alleged that Schwarzenegger "knowingly joined the hush-hush encounters as part of the campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits."

Davis and his lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante, were and remain in court to force some energy companies to "disgorge" what they maintain are illegal profits from the energy crisis. If the Enron allegations are true, Schwarzenegger's policy could square with the Enron meeting only if he were to sabotage the potential for energy company refunds. He might get away with groping, but it's unlikely he'd get away with that.

Schwarzenegger has refused so far to address the issue. On October 6, at a tightly directed Schwarzenegger event, Palast reported, a protester shouted that the gubernatorial candidate was "in bed with Ken Lay"; Arnold responded, "I certainly wasn't in bed with you."