The engineers have already explained how in fact the electric companies do indeed burn slightly less fuel in proportion to one less 60 watt light bulb being used (all other things being equal.)
If energy in the gigawatt hour range could be stored efficiently, the world could save a bundle on energy cost, and any company that produced such a device would gather riches beyond compare. As it is, keeping the energy stored in the unburned oil is the most efficient method of storage. Storing it chemically would be the most efficient alternate method, but why bother when it already is stored chemically as oil?
The major reason for the present relatively high price of electicity in California, or anywhere in the US, is the way the generating system is forced to operate by the governments. Like every implementation of socialist ideas, it creates economic inefficiencies (high cost) and courts crises of shortage or surplus. One thing the regulating bodies do is deny electric companies permission for sufficent reserve plants to meet large peak demand. Then when demand exceeds supply, very expensive to operate plants are restarted. Due to the government, the "spot" price of electricity rockets up. There just does not exist much uncommited capacity that is also cost efficient. The price of capacity already commited to, and paid for, by someone else is not low, and any entity gving up their claim on it likewise putting themselves in a precarious situation which they have already PAID TOO MUCH in order to avoid. I personally believe most of the top level people that avocate the policy know full well what is going to happen, and plan on using the inevitable crises to further their agenda when it occurs. They will attribute the high prices to greedy companies. The shortage to inadequate conservation.
Realistically, the environment is not in danger from electric power companies. The pollution from them is phenominally low. It could be made lower if the power companies were allowed to use the better methods available. There is no oil shortage. There is no energy shortage. The universe and our earth are filled with energy in abundance. New ways of producing and using it more efficiently are created and applied every day. There is not likely to every be an oil shortage of crises proportions provided it is used freely when needed, because as the supply diminishes the price goes up (that's economics), and so the alternative energy generation methods that are unceasingly being refined become a sensible choice. Using energy does not make the environment worse in any significant way for the average citizen. If it did, they could tell. Using energy does not make people worse off. The whole genesis of the Industrial Revolution which made our lives so much more pleasant than the lives of people 300 years ago is the result of harnessing power to do more and more of what was once unremitting, endless toil with very little result. Rushing the end of oil use by government intervention serves no benefit to mankind. In the time availble, we will improve altenative methods further so we won't have to regress to a more difficult life such as was lived in the past, and is still lived in much of the world; and if the past resembles the future, when we switch it may actually more efficient rather than less, as the alternatives are today. Germany and much of the world is on the wrong track. If energy were made better use of there, the people would be better off for it. Not using energy when it is the most efficient thing to do is just a bad idea in every way, and that is what the taxation that makes the energy price high in Europe causes.
Things in the US are better than elsewhere because we do some things slightly better than elsewhere, and have for a long time. Germany is no model for the environement, or for government policy that the US should follow. If we did, we could be no better off than the Germans, and probably not that well off either. The Germans beat us on brainpower and invention. Now if only they had good government policy and a sense of practicality. Even the right-wingers in Germany are socialists. (Adolph Hitler, which every right winger is compared to, headed the National Socialists, ie. Nazi-onal) With stricter socialist measures West Germany could have achieved the economic state that East (Communist) Germany did in the parallel time.
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