I don't think you can really blame the dot coms for the california power shortage. Poor planning in general, perhaps... Building a real data center requires new construction and pleny of permits, so the utilities know how much power they're going to be using. "Good" data centers try to be located in between two power blocks and be hooked up to both for redundancy.

If you go back and look, you could see how long it's been since california built a new power plant. Growth in general can be blamed for part of the power shortage. However, a large part of the energy shortage was manufactured by companys profiteering off the semi-free market -- utilites had to charge a specified rate for each kilowatt, but they had to buy it on the "open" market. Instead of price, the only thing regulating demand was comercials asking us to do our laundry at night. That's bound to cause problems, and it did. I'm still waiting to find out where the billions that california poured into Enron went...

Matthew