California Dreaming

Amory Lovins argues that the California electricity crisis was caused by botched restructuring and concentrated market power rather than a shortage of generating capacity or soaring demand from the Internet. He provides data from the California Energy Commission to show that per-capita electricity use remained flat for twenty-five years and that peak loads in 2000 did not show a general upward trend. Lovins asserts that the crisis was exacerbated by dominant suppliers strategically withholding power to maintain high prices, and he defends his advocacy for energy efficiency and decentralized renewables as successful policies that would have forestalled the disaster had they not been abandoned in the mid-1990s.

• The growth of the Internet has not caused electricity demand to soar; the Internet's electricity use is described as a "tiny use of electricity" and an "irrefutable, carefully measured fact."
• California's per-capita electricity use remained approximately flat for 25 years, with data from the California Energy Commission showing an increase of at most 0.3% from 1990 to 2000.
• The California electricity crisis was not caused by a lack of generating capacity, as the state experienced rolling blackouts at 29 GW in winter 2000/01 despite having met a peak load of 53 GW in summer 1999.
• The crisis was driven by "Botched restructuring, concentrated market power, and strategic bidding," where seven firms held two-thirds of the competitive bidding space and found it more profitable to withhold electricity to keep prices high.
• Energy efficiency, cogeneration, and nonhydro renewables added over 15 GW of resources by the early 1990s and increased California's electrical productivity since 1997 nearly four times faster than the rest of the United States.

APA

Lovins, A. B. (2001). California Dreaming. RMI. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/05/RMI_Document_Repository_Public-Reprts_E01-17_CalifDreaming.pdf

Chicago

Lovins, Amory B. California Dreaming. RMI, 2001. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/05/RMI_Document_Repository_Public-Reprts_E01-17_CalifDreaming.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite press release |last1=Lovins |first1=Amory B. |title=California Dreaming |publisher=RMI |date=15 May 2001 |url=https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/05/RMI_Document_Repository_Public-Reprts_E01-17_CalifDreaming.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@misc{lovins2001california, author = {Lovins, Amory B.}, title = {{California Dreaming}}, publisher = {RMI}, year = {2001}, month = may, url = {https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/05/RMI_Document_Repository_Public-Reprts_E01-17_CalifDreaming.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }