California has finally fixed one of the idiocies of the so-called “deregulation” of electricity that made a joke of the notion that it was really deregulation, as opposed to a change from one form of regulation to another, dumber one.

Power companies are now allowed to make long-term contracts. Why they weren’t already allowed to do this in the original plan, which is fundamental to balancing risk and price, and and the lack of which was the cause of much of the gaming by Enron and others, is a mystery known only to the economic cretins who crafted it.