Four Corners residents, who believe their utility bills are high enough as it is, have watched in amazement as California electric companies have been forced to buy power on the open market in order to keep the lights on in that state.

Other parts of the United States and Canada have profited from the sale of surplus power to California, some of it at extremely high rates. California regulators and legislators are trying to sort out the mess and devise a long-term solution, and one of the points that remains to be seen is whether it will be a California solution or a recognition that this is a regional issue.

Coal-fired power plants in New Mexico and Arizona provide electricity for distant cities, a deal that has both good features and bad. Local generation provides local jobs for both miners and power-plant operators, and there’s no doubt that it makes more sense to transport electricity than coal. Unfortunately, though, those advantages come at a cost, including health problems caused by the brown cloud the plants spew into the atmosphere. By rights, some of that pollution belongs to the power consumers.

Mexico has a surplus of natural gas that could also be used to generate power. Gas is a little easier to ship than coal, which means that power generation could take place either in the gas fields or in California. Our new president could broker such a deal, improving relations with (and perhaps conditions in) Mexico while helping to solve California’s crisis.

Hydropower is clean, but it involves water running from the high country — the Rocky Mountains — to the sea, and there’ll be years when the snowpack won’t support that. Solar is good, as is wind, but development of those power sources has lagged because they haven’t been needed. Now that they are, the technology is far from implementation. Nuclear technology exists, but the permitting process is — and should be — rigorous and lengthy. There are no quick solutions in sight.

California has plans to bring 5,000 megawatts of generating power on line by summer, an equal amount next year, and then 20,000 in 2003. One megawatt is sufficient power for the average family, a statistic that isn’t terribly relevant because residential consumption is only part of the problem in California. Server farms for the dot-com companies have contributed to the crunch, and that adds another element to the issue of responsibility, because the eventual "consumers" of dot-com services might be on the other side of the earth.

It’s growing increasingly difficult to isolate problems such as power shortages to the states in which they originate. On the one hand, California regulators definitely should be required to plan for California’s growth and not expect neighbors to take up the slack. On the other hand, the problem definitely spills over, in the price of goods we have never been forced to associate with electricity: Valentine’s Day roses, for example, grown in heated greenhouses on the West Coast. It may be fortunate for the Interior West that California’s current problem is economic in nature; otherwise we might find ourselves outbid for the electricity that lights our own homes and businesses.