Passage Two
Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage.
In California the regulators, the utilities and the governor all want the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to cap spot (现货的) market prices. The Californians claim it will rein in outrageous prices. Federal regulators have refused. The battle is on.
Governor Gray Davis says,“I’m not happy with the Federal Regulatory Commission at all. They’re living in an ivory tower. If their bills were going up like the people in San Diego, they would know that this is a real problem in the real world.”
As part of deregulation, price caps were removed to allow for a free market. Timing is everything; natural gas prices had already skyrocketed. Demand was high from California’s booming economy. No new power plants had been built here in ten years, and power producers had the right to hike prices along with demand. And hike them they did.
Loretta Lynch of the Public Utilities Commission says,” This commission and all of California was beating down the door of federal regulators to say‘help us impose reasonable price caps to help to keep our market stable.”
Federal regulators did ask for longer-term contracts between power producers and the utilities to stabilize prices. The federal commission, unavailable for comment on this story, released a recent statement defending its position not to re-regulate.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Dec. 15,2000: “The commission?s intention is to enable the markets to catch up to current supply and demand problems and not to reintroduce command and control regulation that has helped to produce the current crisis.”
Some energy experts believe that, without temporary price caps, the crisis will continue.
Severin Borenstein of the U.C. Energy Institute says,“Some federal regulators have a blind commitment to making the market work and I think part of the problem is they really don?t understand what?s going on.”
Gary Ackerman of the Western Power Trading Forum says,“He’s dead wrong about that. The federal regulators understand far better than any individual state that, though it might be painful and it certainly is painful in California, price caps don’t work. They never work.” 【題組】20. Energy experts against price caps believe that .
(A) the present situation in California will continue unless there is price control
(B) the current crisis is partly attributed to previous command and control policy
(C) price caps can temporarily solve energy problems an individual state meets with
(D) they do understand what is going on in California and will take proper measures
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