Alberta’s electricity cost surge helps drive inflation even as energy prices drop

Look PP! It's not Trudeau driving inflation, it's Smith!

The mess of surcharges, fees, allowances, etc on every utility bill gives them all (province, cities, municipalities, utilities) the opportunity to blame each other for the "real reason customer bills are so high". Which is the way they all want it, exploiting the utter chaotic mess the utility system was thrown into when Klein deregulated it back in the 1990's. It'll never be fixed either because there's too many with too much stroke making too much money off of this chaos. And the one making bank off this situation won't allow their golden goose, which turned out to be the greatest rip-off of the customers of an essential service in Canadian history, to ever be threatened. These fuckers are so devious & outright inventive with their scams that they could teach the Mexican drug cartels a few lessons on hard-nosed business tactics.

Want to make some real money from what is essentially legalized thievery? Go work on Wall Street. Or for a power company. Nothing but delicious gravy for those lucky enough not to have any sort of conscience at all.

That's what happens when yo privatize things. Higher prices, worse service. Only thing consumers gain is the 'freedom' to choose who rips you off.
The mouthpiece for a handful of power companies will now mandate what the federal govt's climate policy shall be. Premier Puppet.

The privatization part actually works really well. A solar installation can offer to sell power to the grid for cheap during the day, and the gas and coal plants can't compete. Then at night, the gas and coal take over to meet demands. Which will change when more solar plants build short term storage facilities, the thing Smith is trying to stop.

The problem, as T points out, is that fees kill you. I've paid $18 for electricity, but $150 in random fees in a month. That is what the NDP controlled, and what the UCP stopped when they got elected. Power bills doubled last month, over the same time last year and the year before.

Private ompanies can sell alternative power even to provincially owned systems. The privatization of the main supply is the problem when it comes to change and modernization.
The BS breaking consumer's bills into hundreds of "fees" is the standard practice of Tories who insist that the 'tax' portion is reduced. As if paying that $50 bill from the Crown Corp that owned it all was worse than paying $150 total and that part was reduced to $45 of the total.
Our local MLA got booted from caucus for exposing a Gordon Campbell plan to do something similar, sell off just the Hydro lines and claiming that would save us money.
In the end they just used every other sleazy private corp practice like centralization. Close the office in town, move the workers to one 60km away, wait a decade and close that one, move the remaining workers another 150km away... so now there's at least a 2 hour response to any outage and 12 hour outages are common place.

100% agree. The myth that Klein started that the private system means you can choose your provider is the biggest "I won't come in your mouth" inflicted on the Alberta population.

I challenge anyone to actually try to change your electricity provider. It also doesn't matter who you choose, they each only service certain areas. And usually the only choice is to switch to a shell company that charges you a little fee for what the power company that operates local to you charges. Epcor in Edmonton and area. You can't have Epcor in Calgary. You can't have Enmax in rural Alberta. And no matter who is your provider, Atco delivers it because they own and maintain the lines. And "Direct Energy" and "Direct Energy Regulated" are NOT the same company!

Interesting way to describe it. And entirely accurate too, given that Alberta utility customers have been the centerpiece of the most devious deregulation bukkake seen in all of North America, second only to Enron's hilarity in Caligulafornia and Texans almost freezing to death a couple of winters ago thanks to an ice storm nearly destroying their grid altogether.

Lather rinse repeat though, once again in full bukkake style, because there is zero reason to believe the public will ever stop voting for the corporate-connected criminals who installed & then personally benefited from these deregulated systems at the behest of their benefactors on Wall Street. We'll complain all we want but the face splattering is going to continue uninterrupted. All that will change will be the Orwellian type of changing terms & altered language that they'll deploy to hypnotize the dullards into believing they're getting a great deal out of all this.

And Danielle Smith just nixed any new renewable energy projects for half a year and preventing more energy from coming on that could've increased the supply and in turn decreased the overall power price.

And here I thought conservatives were the ones who were supposed to be the experts on economics including, you know, the law of supply and demand.

Have you not been paying attention?

Conservatives now want only to . Whatever they need to do to get there is just fine.