'FRONTLINE' REPORT ON ENERGY: WE'RE DOOMED.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

If your area isn't suffering from a rolling blackout this evening, your time would best be spent checking out ``Blackout,'' a ``Frontline'' report on California's energy shortage, one that we, it seems inevitable, will be sharing with the rest of the country.

The reasons for the current crisis are many and extraordinarily messy, and ``Frontline''/New York Times correspondent Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino in ``The Insider'') does his best to clear things up.

The upshot is that just portions of California's energy industry were deregulated about five years ago, to what is now quite obviously disastrous results. The price caps on what providers could be charged were deregulated, while the amounts customers could be charged were not; the result was Pacific Gas and Electric declaring bankruptcy, the third- largest bankruptcy in our nation's history.

In 1999, California paid $7 billion to run its power plants; this year, the cost could potentially soar to 10 times that.

This begs the question - should something so crucial to Americans' day-to-day existence be subjected to the capricious whims of the free market, an entity not known for its social concerns?

Attempting to answer the question, Bergman tracks down Texas energy executives of Houston's ``Energy Alley'' getting fat and wealthy off our energy woes. They say things like ``We are the good guys - we are on the side of the angels'' and insist California's crisis is for the good of the country. It's clearly implied, however, that these guys thrive on their own greed as the rest of us hungrily feed off, well, energy.

The richer-getting-rich of Houston's Energy Alley say California's woes were due to the fact that the state only partially deregulated the industry - total deregulation would have worked out just fine, they say; nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

Nonetheless, Bergman unsurprisingly reports, other states exploring energy deregulation are getting cold feet, and not because their furnaces don't operate at night.

What's really depressing is the last half-hour of the report, which wanders through the morass of finger-pointing and political red tape strangling the possibility for a quick and equitable conclusion to the problem. ``Frontline's'' bottom line is that the White House and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are both run by free-market champions with dangerously close ties to the energy industry. In other words, we're doomed.

``FRONTLINE: BLACKOUT''

What: Documentary about the current energy crisis.

Where: KCET.

When: 10 tonight.

Our rating: Three stars

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Photo:

The San Francisco store where Brian Freitas works closed Jan. 17 due to a rolling blackout. California's continuing energy crisis is examined in ``Frontline: Blackout,'' tonight on KCET.