What's even more worrisome is that summer is coming, and that usually means rolling blackouts. I wonder how this will affect all of their customers. I know companies like Green Mountain and others lease from Oncor, and put their power back into the grid elsewhere. Does anybody understand the electricity/utility business enough to explain how this will affect Texans?<p>I also wonder how Texas's emerging reliance on wind power affected this, too. It may be a very good thing, as Texas has a very high percentage of power coming from wind.
I get my energy from this company. I wonder how that will affect me. This goes to show you what a colossal ####up leveraged buyouts often are. My employer was worth 4B and had 1B in debt when it was LBO'd seven years ago. Now it is worth 4B and has 3.6B in debt. What a waste.
Well this does not sounds as bad as the last Texas energy company that filed for bankruptcy.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron</a>
The article wastes a lot of words but fails to explain the mechanism why low natural gas prices are a problem for this company. It just talks about money and equity. What an odd way of looking at things.
Energy Future Holdings pretty much demonstrates what might be wrong with private equity.<p>All players, namely Goldman Sachs, KKR and TPG pretty much recouped their investments in the company so at least they broke even. The suckers might be the folks losing jobs for these companies to come out of bankruptcy.<p>Also a lot of times PE firms start buying the debt when the company is doomed to fail and trading at a discount to actual value and they have another go at the company post bankruptcy restructuring.