In The Black(Out)

The bastards Enron-ed us last month:

Somebody made a quick buck off 500,000 New Yorkers’ misery during last month’s 48-minute blackout in The Bronx and Upper East Side.

In the minutes after lightning zapped Con Ed equipment in Queens at 3:42 p.m. on June 27, the real-time wholesale price for a megawatt hour of electricity in New York City spiked more than 900 percent, from $184.44 to $1,710.19.

That price was in effect for just five minutes, starting at 3:55 p.m. By 4 p.m., the price dropped by half, to $864.64. At 4:05 p.m., the price dropped again to $364.35, before hitting $272.02, more in line with real-time prices, five minutes later.

The windfall from the five-minute price spike probably ended up in the hands of power generators.

But the buyer, the New York Independent System Operator — which runs the state’s electricity-transmission system and sells power to utilities like Con Ed — won’t say how much power it bought at that price, or from whom it bought the power.

“It’s market-sensitive information,” said Garry Brown, an ISO spokesman. “We don’t want everybody else knowing who got paid what.”

. . .

KeySpan, which generates a quarter of the city’s electricity, reported June 6 that the Justice Department had requested documents and information relating to an “investigation of competitive issues in the New York City electric-energy capacity market.”

The five-minute price spike will be passed on to consumers, but Brown said it will be unnoticeable.