Success Quote by Kenneth Lay

Kenneth Lay’s sentence is a master class in executive-passive voice: “it’s been very difficult” for reasons that conveniently arrive without agents, interests, or names attached. The verb choice, “site,” sounds technocratic and neutral, as if California’s energy crisis were primarily a zoning paperwork problem. That’s the intent on the surface: recast a market and governance failure as a permitting bottleneck, implying the cure is deregulation, faster approvals, fewer environmental reviews, less local veto power.

The subtext is sharper. Lay isn’t just describing difficulty; he’s distributing blame. By pointing to California’s alleged inability to build new plants, he redirects scrutiny away from companies profiting from scarcity and toward the state’s political culture of process, regulation, and public input. It’s a rhetorical judo move: the more the public worries about price spikes and rolling blackouts, the more persuasive it sounds to argue the real villain is bureaucracy, not the market actors who benefit from tight supply.

Context does the heavy lifting. Lay led Enron during the early-2000s California electricity crisis, when trading strategies and deliberate supply constriction helped inflate prices. In that light, the quote reads less like diagnosis than like preemptive narrative control: scarcity as an unfortunate byproduct of California’s choices, rather than a condition that can be engineered and monetized. Even the grammar performs innocence. No one is “making” it difficult; it simply “has been.” That’s not just corporate spin - it’s a bid to launder responsibility through the language of infrastructure.