Is the Electrical Brown-out a deliberate rip off?

The last scam going in Electricity involved Genesee power plant planned shut down and, the activation of the Clover Bar plant. On the surface this seems like nothing however, the cheap supplies from Saskatchewan and BC were not used. Instead, a huge amount of money was pumped into the owners of the PPA for Clover Bar who, also held PPAs in the Genesee operation. A cash flow operation!

Simply put we were robbed!

When they were busted on Ralph’s world, the decision was prompted to shut down Clover Bar generation as it was too expensive being powered by natural gas which is now being given away to the oil companies at the tar sands.


AESO is to get advance warnings of outages from the PPA buyers. Then, if the planned shut down is going to cause brown outs, the AESO can ask (not order) the plant to change the date of it’s planned shut down. This should control costs.

What happened in Alberta was a number of plants shut down at the same time. Consider much of the Production is owned by the same PPA people. This little trick forced the price of electricity from 100.00 to 1000.00 per MwH. Considering the demand was peaked at some 8000 Mwh these same plants made a windfall profit of 192 million dollars over the course of 1 day! For days!

The question has to be asked is this a deliberate manipulation of the electrical system for profit? If so it is not the first time! It is time to heat up your phones to your MLA.

And yes, you will see it on your utility bills.

Ralph has said his deregulation is working fine. The criteria for success are the profit the companies are returning and that only. This is the Conservative way.

This is a cut and paste from the AESO link under the History tab.

9.Outage Scheduling CoordinationAll the PPA Buyers and GFOs are expected to review and take into account the short-term to mid term system supply adequacy when they prepare the schedules for their unit outages. It is expected that the PPA Buyers and the GFOs , in response to market forces, will change their outage schedules when needed to avoid insufficient supply situations. The changes in the original schedules should be communicated to the AESO, as specified in subsection 5a above. Each day, the AESO will review the next 7 (seven) day schedules for generation outages. Whenever an outage is scheduled for a date/time when the supply margin appears to be insufficient, the AESO personnel will contact the Buyer or GFO involved and:
a. advise of situation; b. suggest changes in schedule
etc


4. Types of outages covered

1. a) Forced Outage - the occurrence of a component failure or other condition that requires to remove the generating unit from service immediately or up to or including the very next weekend. b) Maintenance Outage - the removal of a generating unit from service to perform work on specific components which could have been postponed past the very next weekend. This is work done to prevent a potential forced outage and which could not be postponed from season to season. c) Planned Outage - the removal of a generating unit from service for inspection and/or general overhaul of one or more major equipment groups. This work is usually scheduled well in advance.
Since Forced Outages are generally not scheduled, out of these three types of outages, only the last two outage types (maintenance and planned) could be subject to effective scheduling coordination.

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Also there is a distinct possibility the heavy service power line between Calgary and Edmonton overloaded and tripped a breaker (heavy usage at 8000 MW)
This in turn may have blown other breakers.

Serious coin was pocketed in the meantime, it changes nothing.

cyberclark@shaw.ca