Alberta homeowners don't want to shop for electricity, says Alberta Tory

EDMONTON - - A member of Alberta's electricity advisory council says the province should stop short of implementing full electrical deregulation.

George VanderBurg is also part of Premier's Ralph Klein's Progressive Conservative party. He said Alberta homeowners don't want to shop for electricity.

Many homeowners and small business operators don't want to have to go shopping for an electricity supplier, said VanderBurg.

He said he will press his government colleagues to let people continue to buy electricity at a regulated rate if they want.

"I like having the option of going and seeking a contract if I wish, but my mother sure likes the option of having a regulated rate product," VanderBurg told The Canadian Press.

He said his mother doesn't want to be left wondering if she can trust the person knocking on her door with a contract.

"She likes the regulated rate product and so do my constituents," said VanderBurg, who represents the northwestern Alberta riding of Whitecourt-Ste. Anne.

VanderBurg said it doesn't make sense to force his constituents to shop for electricity at a deregulated rate when there is only one utility, Enmax, currently selling it.

"There's only one choice. That's not a free and open marketplace," he said.

"Maybe someday we'll have five or six or seven companies that are offering different contracts and they are competitive . . . but we're not there now. We're not even close to being there."

Energy Minister Murray Smith suggested in an interview last year that the province may have to settle for a regulated rate for the small consumers who use only about 15 per cent of the province's electricity.

While deregulation appears to be working on the wholesale side, which uses 85 per cent of the province's electricity, the Alberta retail marketplace may be too small to attract enough competition to drive the price of electricity down, Smith said.

That's why the province has already extended the deadline for small businesses and homeowners to move to deregulation to 2006 - a date critics point out is beyond the next provincial election.

Small businesses were initially supposed to make the jump to deregulated electricity Jan. 1, 2004, while residential consumers had until Jan. 1, 2006.

But Smith said recently that the province has not given up on its efforts to implement full deregulation.

"Right now, we made the decision to move the small business market to July 2006, because there wasn't a competitive marketplace ready," Smith said.

"Let's see what happens as we move toward June 2006. Let's not presuppose the future."

Klein told reporters that he isn't aware of any plans to keep retail consumers permanently on a regulated rate, although electricity experts say that has been a path taken by other jurisdictions that have deregulated their wholesale markets.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses remains hopeful that competition will be attracted to the province, said Alberta director Corinne Pohlmann.

"We're hoping that other electricity firms that are already in the Alberta market but offer a product only to bigger companies, once they have saturated that market maybe some of them will look to the small business end of the marketplace," she said.

"Why go down this (road) in the first place if we can't attract the competitive forces that allow us all to benefit from deregulation?"

The premier defended deregulation in the legislature recently, saying prices have stabilized and electrical generation has increased by 30 per cent.

He said investors are contemplating another $6 billion in investment in the electricity market by the end of 2006, adding another 5,400 megawatts of power.