Quote:
Originally Posted by Allan_L
The people you pay for electricity have never produced electricity.
Back before the madness (circa 1990) in NSW, we had The Electricity Commission of NSW (who owned and operated the Generators and the Grid (poles and wires) and they also had interests in Elcom collieries to boot.
But the retailers were a mish-mash of "County Councils" who bought electricity from the Commission and on sold it to those in their local area.
With the decentralisation and "rationalisation" of the system (in preparation for selling the whole kit and caboodle to private business) many of these were combined in to a few big retailers, and eventually, they were allowed to contract customers outside their local areas. This then allowed outsiders (like AGL etc) to also buy and sell electricity to customers.
It is all smoke and mirrors, as they do not physically deliver the electricity to their customers. They just trade on a market similar to a futures market where they time their trades to buy cheap and sell expensive, so to speak, and at the end of a contract period they must match out their buys and sells of course (because they cannot produce to make up a shortfall, and they cannot store any excess).
So yes, their are in-operative profit takers getting a piece of your pie, the Govt maintains it will yield more competition and lower prices to the public, ...(no comment).
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Besides the traders making an obvious profit out of what I thought was a commodity such as water, who else benefits off the current system?