Let's Get Out of Back Rooms to a Generative Dialogue

I posted the following comment on www.EnergyPulse.net as a follow up to the article AMI Services Solutions for Alberta’s Deregulated Market, on what were supposed to be its Part 3. This is what I wrote:

To enthusiasts, visionaries, and pragmatics readers,

Now I understand the meaning of what Prof. Banks said that it seem confusing to me: "it makes it clear to me that it's time to get out my anti-deregulation soapbox again." He is exactly where I placed him - in the skeptics. I agree: at least in this case he is well "behind the times." What he studied about deregulation - in detail – has been made obsolete with Electricity Without Price Controls (EWPC). What he studied was a deregulation that kept the small customer under price controls; deregulation which was only intended to satisfy the need of big industry, by making large rents transfers from the small customers to the system (utilities and big industry). It was a deregulation designed to stop progress.

Deregulation, as explained in 2001 was design as a scam. Donella Meadows got it very close to its essence in the article Restructuring and Faith in the Market. She said that a price control in one part of the system is perverse socialism. That is what price controls do to any industry by lacking transparency (read as corruption).

I suggest a generative dialogue (not a debate) here in Energy Pulse, instead of back rooms, based on what Donella left us:

… some general rules are obvious. Plan far ahead, and plan for the welfare of the whole system, not just the utilities or the big consumers. Remember that demand reductions are as effective as supply increases and cheaper and cleaner. Don't set up the poor to bid against the rich. Don't try to control prices in only one part of the system. Don't hide real costs. Throw away comfortable myths about how the market will do everything for us and start thinking.
Above all don't allow anything as critical as electricity (or health care or airline safety or food or pharmaceutical safety) to be restructured by power brokers in back rooms.

Electricity Without Price Controls is about transparent efficiency and thus for anybody with a desire to spend less money for electricity. EWPC is about the development of the resources on the demand side, as energy efficiency and demand response, which are the two best strategies. It is about integrating why I call the “Sálvese Quien Pueda (SQP)” market with the interconnected system.

EWPC is about changing from fuel price amplification to fuel price mitigation. EWPC is about making the transition to a decentralized system, by keeping the bare bones wires infrastructure centralized while retailers compete with each other to allow customers spend less for electricity.

EWPC is an integral-reform-paradigm based on a clear vision of the End-State (for quite some time) of the electricity industry. It is about thinking, not just about markets.

I invite enthusiasts, visionaries, and pragmatics readers to follow the late Donella Meadows advise: “don't allow anything as critical as electricity (or health care or airline safety or food or pharmaceutical safety) to be restructured by power brokers in back rooms.” Let’s do it here in EnergyPulse in English and in the GMH blog in Spanish.