Mountain View Power Blogs

April 15, 2021 In this mini blog series, we will shed light on the inner workings of the Alberta electricity market so that you understand where your charges are coming from and how to approach your MLA on issues related to your utilities. Our goal, as always, is to help consumers save money on their monthly utility bills. --- Welcome back to our mini blog series on the Alberta Electricity Market! To recap: The wholesale electricity market in Alberta is set up as an auction. Generators above a certain size connected to the grid must submit an offer to produce electricity unless their facilities are unable to do so - these are the sellers in the auction. The sellers’ offers can be anywhere from $0 and $999.99/MWh. Offers are ordered from cheapest to most expensive into a stack called the merit order. Each minute’s price is set at the last offer in the merit order needed to meet demand. Only generators that offered at or below the price set by the market are called to produce electricity...

  Wholesale Prices and the Merit Stack To help consumers better understand Alberta’s energy market, we approached a friend in the industry, Matt Ayres, and asked him to help lay the foundational building blocks. This is the first in a series of four blogs that will run throughout April. Over the course of these blogs, we will try to address topics such as why electricity prices are spiking and economic withholding. We will also provide an opinion  on the debate between the NDP and UCP over electricity retail prices and subsidies. For most consumers, the electricity market is quite simple. You sign up for service with a retailer, they send you your bill, and you pay for the electricity that you use. But when February’s polar vortex gripped Alberta in its icy claws, many consumers saw their electricity invoices spike to very high levels. We all saw what happened in Texas, but how many consumers truly understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ that resulted in such high electricity invoices?...