Quote:
Originally Posted by Tron_fdc
Well, electricity is a little different. In this case a lot of the generation is owned by the retailers (in Calgary's case, Enmax) so in order for a new retailer to come on line they would have to own their own power generation facilities, buy spot market from the power pool, or enter into a long term contract from Enmax.
There are small retailers that own generation, but they don't have enough to supply large municipalities like Calgary. They focus on large industries. Add to the fact that banks won't lend money for a new power plant unless you have long term contracts with an end user in place, and you can see how hard it is to become a generator or a retailer in Alberta.
Electricity has been a gong show since day one when we spent countless hours on radio and TV fighting it, but finally gave up when every fact and fallacy that we came up with was largely ignored by the Klein government. It was quite the introduction to politics for us, and ultimately changed the way we did business.
I'm actually surprised it took this long for it to go completely sideways.
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I am not saying that building a power plant/power grid is easy. However what I am saying is that deregulation (real, not what they did in California) increases competition because more companies are likely to enter the market (when they see that profits can be made).
Does deregulation guarantee new competitors? No it doesn't. However, regulation pretty much guarantees that no new competitors will enter the market.