[Newsbot]

Title: Alberta power rates among highest in country; deregulated market blamed for price spikes
Category: Business
Posted By: DrCaleb
Date: 2012-10-15 14:26:07
Canadian

[saturn_656]

Aren't all residental users in Ontario on Time of Use rates by now? How do they get those prices for Toronto and Ottawa?

Prices change four times a day.

[SprCForr]

It's going to go up too. All those wind farms being built will drive the price higher.

We should have built a nuke plant dammit.

[Xort]

Nothing like having a deregulated market so producers pick the cheap to build option then charge anything they want to consumers to make up the operating costs.

The Thorium future can't come fast enough.

[Lemmy]

That's the first intelligent thing you've said in 600 posts. I guess that wasn't much of a compliment.

[Public_Domain]

[Thanos]

This scam that happened here in Alberta was what first began to turn me against conservative economics that worship the (alleged) free market and promote deregulation as the cure-all to all problems. Not fun at all finding that what you believed in turns out to be all lies. Fifteen years of Albertans getting ripped off is all that this bullshit ever amounted to.

[Unsound]

Fact is power isn't, and can never be, a free market.

When you have a product that you can't do without, and that has very few suppliers (who all have to use the same infrastructure anyways) the invisible hand is shackled.

De-regulation: great for liqour stores, bad for power.

[raydan]

Unsound Unsound:

Fact is power isn't, and can never be, a free market.

When you have a product that you can't do without, and that has very few suppliers (who all have to use the same infrastructure anyways) the invisible hand is shackled.

De-regulation: great for liqour stores, bad for power.

I have Hydro-Québec... so I'll say "yup".

Mind you, I also have La Société des alcools du Québec, so I pay more for alcohol.
But I buy way more electricity than booze.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

raydan raydan:

Unsound Unsound:

Fact is power isn't, and can never be, a free market.

When you have a product that you can't do without, and that has very few suppliers (who all have to use the same infrastructure anyways) the invisible hand is shackled.

De-regulation: great for liqour stores, bad for power.

I have Hydro-Québec... so I'll say "yup".

Mind you, I also have La Société des alcools du Québec, so I pay more for alcohol.
But I buy way more electricity than booze.

You LIE!!!
Ontario's hydro rates weren't too bad until McNuggets decided to spend billions of dollars to "boost" Ontario's emission free hydro generation from 75% to 75%.
I don't understand why the turbines when the refurbishment of #4 reactor at Bruce was still underway with plans to refurbish Darlington and Pickering as well. 400+ "windmills" in Ontario and they barely supply a tenth of the homes that #4 at Bruce does alone. The money would probably have been better spent upgrading the transmission/delivery system.

[Curtman]

$1:

Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver — ranged from seven to eight cents per kWh for an average home. Those cities are served by relatively inexpensive hydro power while the bulk of Alberta electricity is generated from coal or more expensive natural-gas-fired plants.

Good for you chumps and your Alberta advantage.

$1:

Edmonton — 13.63
Winnipeg — 7.68

It's the same distance from Thompson to Edmonton as it is from Thompson to Winnipeg. Build some transmission lines and swap us Natural Gas for Hydro. Burning fossil fuels to power cities is a tremendous waste of a finite resource, you should be ashamed of the constant smoke.

[ShepherdsDog]

$1:

It's the same distance from Thompson to Edmonton as it is from Thompson to Winnipeg.

No it's not. It's 764 km from Thompson to Winnipeg by highway, or 655 as the crow flies . It's 1035km, as the crow flies from Edmonton to Thompson. 350 km may not seem like much, but having to string a new transmission line and access roads over a thousand kilometers, would make it a hell of alot more expensive. Even considering the preexisting lines in place over a small part of that distance, the infrastructure costs would make it cost prohibitive

[peck420]

Alberta's deregulated?

Funny, seems I need Epcor's permission to generate above a certain point of power.

Is Calgary deregulated? Edmonton sure as hell isn't.

[jj2424]

Curtman Curtman:

$1:

Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver — ranged from seven to eight cents per kWh for an average home. Those cities are served by relatively inexpensive hydro power while the bulk of Alberta electricity is generated from coal or more expensive natural-gas-fired plants.

Good for you chumps and your Alberta advantage.

$1:

Edmonton — 13.63
Winnipeg — 7.68

It's the same distance from Thompson to Edmonton as it is from Thompson to Winnipeg. Build some transmission lines and swap us Natural Gas for Hydro. Burning fossil fuels to power cities is a tremendous waste of a finite resource, you should be ashamed of the constant smoke.

By fluke of nature Manitoba got hydro and Alberta got the dry prairie. Where would Manitoba be without it?

BTW Alberta is the largest( per capita )wind energy producer in Canada.

http://www.canwea.ca/farms/index_e.php

[Zipperfish]

Unsound Unsound:

Fact is power isn't, and can never be, a free market.

When you have a product that you can't do without, and that has very few suppliers (who all have to use the same infrastructure anyways) the invisible hand is shackled.

De-regulation: great for liqour stores, bad for power.

Not t mention apaprt from dams (and to a much tinier extent, batteries) you can't store your product.

You can't just turn off a coal fired plant which means you have to sell that power you're creating in the middle of the night, when nobody really wants it, cheap. BC (which runs on hydroelectric power, primarily) buys that power and then sells it back at peak hours, when they have all their dams going. We do the same with California. Used to anyways--California got prety pissed at us about it once.