In earlier articles and essays I explained that the sales of public franchises for private gain, undisciplined by effective competition, produced a concentrated, complicated industry no one intended. Repeated 80 times over 30 years, electricity mergers have wasted economic resources, diverted value from customers to shareholders, weakened competitive forces and intensified intra-corporate conflict. Let’s start with economic waste[…]
In October, 2019 the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC or Commission) issued two decisions addressing requests by ATCO Electric Ltd. (AEL) for recovery of the undepreciated costs of assets damaged or destroyed in the 2016 wildfires in Alberta. One decision was in AEL’s 2018–19 Transmission General Tariff Application (GTA)[…]
On July 1, 2020 the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA came to an end. After 24 years, NAFTA was replaced by a new agreement called the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement.[2] The main impact as far as the energy sector is concerned was elimination of the famous Chapter 11 dispute resolution provision[…]
Natural gas distributors in Canada are under increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Policies at all levels of government impose ambitious GHG emission reduction targets that directly call for reduced use of natural gas. For example, the CleanBC Plan legislates a 40 per cent reduction over the next decade, and encourages electrification[…]
Ontario’s electricity market is materially different than the one envisioned when it opened in May 2002. In the lead-up to market opening, the electricity market was expected to provide competition, lower prices and transparent price signals to both consumers and investors[…]
As we review the current status of Canadian carbon policy in the wake of the 2019 Election, it is clear that the concentration and focus of the federal government on carbon policy during its first term was significant, at least compared to any other area of policy[…]
As noted in our original article, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA or CUSMA) was signed by the leaders of the three NAFTA countries on November 30, 2018. At that time it was unclear how long the ratification process would take[…]
Time-of-Use (TOU) rates, sometimes also called Time-Varying Rates (TVR), include simple time-of-use rates, critical-peak pricing rates, peak time rebates (PTR), variable-peak pricing rates (VPP) and real-time pricing rates (RTP). Today, they are deployed in small numbers in many parts of the globe[…]
With the coming into force on August 28, 2019 of Bill C-69 enacting the Canadian Energy Regulator Act (“CER Act”) and the Impact Assessment Act (“IA Act”), the federal assessment process for energy infrastructure projects was fundamentally restructured.