> But the motivation for this vignette is: I'm interested in information on
> the electrical power industry,
There is an agency responsible for doing the job of market monitoring you have so ambitiously set for yourself, Brad. It's called the Fed. Energy Reg. Comm. in Washington.
FERC is key because to an important extent retail deregulators want to rely on competition in wholesale spot markets to ultimately control prices and assure supply. Calif. has a particular problem because it ordered the utilites there to divest their generation, thus relying, more than other states, on that wholesale market.
Wholesale markets are FERC's jurisdiction. But FERC is a joke. Not only have they rubber stamped merger after merger (mergers have been one of the major effects of dereg; no utility wants to compete, after all, despite what econ 101 textbooks say), but they have failed to move aggressively to open transmission pathways to facilitate the power flows necessary for competition. In short, the institutional structure necessary for competition in either wholesale or retail markets is not there, and won't be, if it ever is, for years yet. The politicians did not know or care anything about this, of course, when the ideologically driven dereg push picked up steam.
More to your point, FERC has shown no interest in even gathering the kind of market information necessary to find out what is happening. I will email you (and anyone else who wants it) a memo a friend of mine at FERC wrote about the appalling lack of data and FERC's disinterest in that fact, under the rule of the empty suits appointed by Clinton (the utilities control the data and won't give them out, including, btw, NERC, which is an association of non-governmental reliability councils formed by, and controlled by, the utilities themselves) I will give you his phone number if you want. You should talk to him.
Market solutions, Brad. Have faith in the [monopoly] market.
As to your specific requests. For ownership, check Moody's and the utility's annual reports for basic info about subsidiaries. Essentially all major operating utilities (the term for the companies, under the old system, who generated and sold power to you) are owned by holding companies, which also own lots of other things, making it difficult to follow the ball on costs and profits. But complete information on everything these holding companies own can only be gotten through discovery at some regulatory or legal proceeding. Like an investigation into market performance, or the next merger request. I've recently done that in Pa. with the FirstEnergy-GPU (the guys who brought us Three Mile Island) merger and each holding company supplied us with pages of single spaced listing all that they own (we think).
Utilities are required to file a Form 1 at FERC that has detailed information on physical plant, purchases and sales by kwh and revenue, etc., which is available for public inspection. The EIA site you discovered publishes compilations of these data. Unfortunately the current Form 1 on file is for 1999, so it is mainly valuable to you for giving a sense of what a company is about, or was about back then, since things have changed so much.
What you won't find is reliable information on market prices themselves, which is the subject of the memo I mentioned. The only way to evaluate market power, e.g., its exercise by a utility economically or physically withholding capacity, is with generation and transmission data in real time or close to that. Individual utilities have it of course, but "it's proprietary". NERC the utility run consortium has it to, but try and get it.
One place to look for some market info though, like power flows, generation capacity and expansion plans and transmission constraints, is the newly created regional transmission ISO there who, I believe, is reponsible for periodic public reports on transactions. ISOs collect info on capacity planning and other operational things, so in the future they are likely to become important imfo sources, to the extent they make things available. As the memo indicates, a national data place for transmission info on capacity, power flows, and interconnection constraints was set up (called OASIS), but FERC let the utilites decide what they would provide, and so it is basically useless for any purpose like yours.
Here's a place to start your thinking about the current "crisis". California is a summer peaking market, meaning that that's when consumption reaches its peak. The annual peak is about 46,000 MW. Right now usage is running about 28,000 MW. Yet we have blackouts, at 18,000MW below what was being supplied a few months ago! Hmmm. Could the problem then be a failure to build and have available enough capacity? Doesn't look like it does it? What happened to that capacity?
It's a little more complicated than that, of course. Some of the capacity supplied during the summer is seasonal (e.g. hydro, available in more abundance then). But not 18,000 MW worth.
So where are you headed with your study, Brad? My friend at FERC is very interested in a public discussion of the lack of market info, and FERC's disinterest in its reponsibilities, despite publicly claiming otherwise, as a way to get to the bottom of things. Like what sense does dereg make for an essential commodity like electricity, capital intensely produced, and without the demand and supply elasticities necessary for markets to work.
If I can help you, let me know.
RO