Power Failure

“I guess you’d pay a bit for power here, Don?” We were standing on his drive days before Christmas, ankle-deep in fresh snow and the temperature was far below freezing. “Yeah, power’s pretty pricy, runs to $50 to $70 a month. Gas is even more but we use it for heating the house.”

My friend Don lives in Roanoke, Virginia, a medium-sized city just east of the Appalachians, at a similar latitude to Hamilton. How could his power bill be half mine when I live in the winterless north of New Zealand and use power as parsimoniously as Jeanette Fitzsimons

Issues

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New Zealand’s power consumption actually went down last year – but not your bill, right? So why, in a country with

one of the world’s most-abundant renewable energy sources, is your electricity costing you twice as much as an American household, in a country with many far-flung, sparsely populated locations? As you brace yourself for another sky-high winter power bill, Warren Judd explains why you’re right to be feeling ripped off.

PoweR FaIluRe

warren judd is a north & south contributing writer.

Rural Taranaki (far left) and rural Oregon, USA (below).

Why do Americans in remote areas pay half as much for

electricity as New Zealanders?

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cost of generation pushing up our elec-tricity bills. The Cook Strait cable is costly, and it’s regularly explained that distribution costs are high in a place like New Zealand with its choppy terrain, few people and long distances. That may be fair comment with respect to a coun-try like Great Britain, but not the US. Pretty much the entire west, probably two-thirds of the country, is much more sparsely inhabited than New Zealand.

Even in California, the most populous state with 38 million, most people live close to the coast or in the Central Val-ley. People are thin on the ground in northern and eastern California, and even thinner in the likes of Nevada, Utah and Montana. And New Zealand is now one of the most urbanised countries in the world, with 87 per cent of us in towns or cities.

Burns, Oregon, is a typical town in the dry western US – slightly seedy and straggling along a few kilometres of Highway 20, the longest road in the country. It has 3000 people and is 200km from any other town larger than a gnat’s whisker north or south, east or west. It’s the county seat of Harney County, popu-lation 7200, covering 26,500 square kilo-metres, 50 per cent larger than North-land and Auckland combined. It’s remoter than anywhere in New Zealand and its power comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, 400km north. What does power cost? Distribution charges are $US21.50 a month and power is seven cents a unit for homes.

Incidentally, Bonneville Power, estab-lished in the 1930s within the US Depart-ment of Energy and charged with sup-plying electricity at cost to local utilities, companies and co-ops, is something like our old Electricity Department (NZED). It produces half of the electricity in the Pacific Northwest and is also responsible for major transmission lines.

The Oregon Trail Electric Co-op, one of two power sellers in Burns, was started in 1987 by three citizens of another rural town, who initiated a local buyout of a disenchanted utility company. It services an area half the size of the North Island with only 33,000 electricity meters.

For comparison, I recently recon-tacted Don about his latest power bill. He paid $US64.92 for 531 kWh (12.2 cents per unit, comprising $24.64 for generation services, $15.68 fuel factor,


$3.94 transmission services, $18.06 dis-tribution services, and $2.60 taxes).

In New Zealand, transmission costs (from Transpower) and distribution charges are lumped into power bills as a lines charge and they’re significant. Nationally, they average 11.6 cents per kWh, ranging from 7.8 to 17.8 cents. For a typical household buying 9000 kWh a year for $2500, annual line charges are $1044 or $87 a month.

Over much of the South Island, lines charges are significantly lower than in the North. This could well be related to the fact that almost South Island lines companies are owned by consumers or municipalities. In North Island urban areas, investor ownership is common.

In the US this year national transmis-sion costs are estimated to be 1.1 cents per kWh, distribution costs 3.1 cents and generation costs 5.6 cents.

ouR elecTRIcITy esTablIsHmeNT often claims New Zealand power prices are not high by world standards. True, Tonga pays about 55 cents per unit and the Solomons double that. Denmark and Germany pay slightly less than Tonga. Nonetheless, it’s misleading because most countries lack our hydro resource. How do we compare with those that generate significant amounts of hydro-electric power?

Norway is intriguing. More than 98 per cent of the power it generates is hy-dro, but the power it uses is 42 per cent fossil, 36 per cent hydro and 22 per cent nuclear. It’s connected to the European grid with cables to the Netherlands and Sweden (others to Germany and Britain are planned, which puts the Cook Strait cable in perspective) and it trades power with a Europe that’s hungry for renew-able energy. The average residential price is NZ17.3 cents per kWh made up of 6.6 cents for the power, 5.2 cents for lines charges, and 5.4 cents tax.

Canada is probably the best compari-son with us. It generates 60 per cent of its electricity from hydro, 20 per cent from fossil fuels and 15 per cent from its home-grown CANDU nuclear reac-tors. Residential prices range from NZ7 cents per kWh to 16.5 cents, with an av-erage of 10.5 cents (excluding taxes of seven to 13 per cent but including dis-tribution charges).

Householders almost always pay more

nuclear, six per cent from other renewa-bles, and the balance from minor sourc-es like diesel generation. In clean green New Zealand in the March 2014 quarter, the main contributors to the nation’s electricity were hydro 57 per cent, gas 17 per cent, geothermal 16 per cent, wind five per cent and coal 3.5 per cent, with a smidgeon from sources like wood and biogas. Since we class geothermal as renewable, that gives us 78 per cent from renewables, compared with only 12 per cent in the US.

Most US coal is now mined in remote places like Wyoming and railed for hun-dreds or thousands of kilometres to gen-erating plants in the Midwest and east-ern seaboard (I’ve watched the trains and thought of the CO2) – and yet it’s apparently still much cheaper than our rainwater.

Hydroelectric dams cost more to build than thermal power plants but a well-built dam lasts indefinitely, so elsewhere in the world hydro is considered cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear.

Of course, there’s more than just the

Above: Most US coal is now mined in remote places like Wyoming and railed for hundreds or thousands of kilometres to generating plants in the Midwest and eastern seaboard – and yet it’s apparently still much cheaper than New Zealand’s rainwater.

Below: More than half of New Zealand’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric plants, such as the Clyde Dam in Central Otago.

Power lines in the US have to service far-flung communities.

sprays Roundup?I decided to look into it…In the United States, the average resi-

dential electricity price is US12.09 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Living on the rural fringe of Auckland – hardly the boondocks – I pay NZ32 cents per kWh. Sure, the New Zealand dollar is worth less than the greenback, but US power is still half the price of mine and Con-sumer NZ’s Powerswitch tells me I’m getting a fair rate for my area. The na-tional average residential price is 28.2 cents a kWh, ranging from 38.2 cents in Balclutha to a whisker under 24 cents in nearby Dunedin.

In the US, Hawaii is an outlier on 37 cents, but there are plenty of mainland states where the price ranges from 8.7 cents (Washington) to 10 cents for a kilowatt-hour.

Apart from price, there’s another big difference between electricity supplies in New Zealand and the US – how they’re generated. Last year in the US, 39 per cent of electricity came from coal, 27 per cent from gas, 19.5 per cent from

than commercial and industrial custom-ers, but in New Zealand that differential is particularly marked. The latest com-prehensive data (2011) has industry pay-ing 11.5 cents per kWh, commercial users 18.8 cents, and householders 28 cents (all including GST).

It has not always been so. From the mid-1970s (when prices for all users were a glorious one to three cents) until 1993, commercial users paid more than house-holders. Residential prices started to

climb in 1984, and accelerated from 2000. Adjusting for inflation, industrial prices have fallen slightly since 1979, commer-cial prices have fallen considerably and residential prices have sky rocketed.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s latest international figures show the gap between industrial and residential prices to be particularly wide, but they draw solace with, “New Zealand’s electricity prices are compa-rable with the United States in terms of

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earlier at their book value of $4.5 billion. The new enterprises lost little time in get-ting their assets revalued by professional services firm Price water houseCoopers, using a process termed “fair-value” ac-counting. Essentially, this assigns a val-ue based on future earning potential. In the case of Mighty River power, assets just acquired for $720.6 million sud-denly became worth $1332.2 million. The significance of this is it’s common for electricity prices to be set at a level that gives a return on assets of about 10 per cent per annum. Hence rising asset valuations become a justification for in-creasing power prices. And once those prices have risen, then the future earning potential of your hydro dams has jolly well increased as well, so in another year or two you need to revalue again. And so it spirals upwards. Excellent for profits, not so hot for customers.

Not only Mighty River, but Meridian, Genesis and the privately owned Contact and Trustpower have all followed similar paths, according to Bertram. He has plotted in detail how each “generator-retailer” (gen-tailer) has regularly re-valued its assets – so 1999’s $4.5 billion became a whopping $23.5 billion by 2012.

Bertram notes that using this sort of regular asset revaluation to set pricing wouldn’t be permitted in many coun-tries, including the US. There, your 10 per cent return would be acceptable but only on what you’d paid for the assets, plus what you’d spent on maintenance, new plant etc.

This historical cost accounting can be calculated for the New Zealand gen-tail-ers and Bertram has worked it out as giv-ing a total asset value of $12.1 billion to-day. He comments that the additional $11.4 billion in revaluations indicates that residential customers are being charged an excess of $1 billion annually, relative to what we would be paying under old-fashioned rate-of-return regulation.

beRTRam Is NoT the only academic to have reservations about our power in-dustry. Between 2005 and 2009, Professor Frank Wolak of Stanford University con-ducted an investigation into New Zea-land’s wholesale electricity industry for the Commerce Commission, following complaints in 2004 by 22 heavyweight industrial users. Their prices had risen little relative to householders’, but they had the ear of the Labour government.

a lengthy investigation of historical pow-er prices. Its report concluded that householders had been undercharged for decades but are now paying their way, whereas commercial users were over-charged in the 80s but now, along with industrial users, are being significantly undercharged. The authority seems somewhat bemused how this could be in a world of such cut-throat competition as the local electricity market.

Wellington economist Geoff Bertram has studied our electricity industry for decades and is scathing about the report. He has commented that it’s only when viewed from the distorted perspective of needing to make a 10 per cent annual return on investment that householders have been undercharged, and our elec-tricity system was never set up that way. Rather, the government’s historic aim was to provide electricity at cost, win-ning from higher taxes as living stand-ards rose and industry prospered.

wHy Have ouR household power prices risen so sharply over the past three dec-ades? Although the Electricity Authority report gives few indications, according to its CEO Carl Hansen, rising fuel costs are the main culprit. Since water and geo thermal steam are our principal fuels (never falling below 65 per cent of gen-eration capacity), this explanation does not seem entirely satisfying. And re-member that coal and gas in the US pro-duce cheap power.

Bertram has a quite different explana-tion for rising prices. Back in 1999, the competing SOEs, Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power, were set up. Unlike the old Electricity Department, whose task was to supply the country with re-liable electricity at cost, SOEs were busi-nesses, charged with making profits for the government. Establishing competing SOEs was meant to act as a brake on the government demand for profit while still returning one nonetheless. Tricky.

According to Bertram, the new SOEs were very lightly regulated in a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that they behave reasonably, and it was left up to them as to how they balanced profiteering for their master with charging consumers. Bertram considers the method the SOEs adopted breaches that understanding.

The assets of ECNZ were transferred to Genesis, Meridian and Mighty River Power in April 1999 and some to Contact

Wellington economist Geoff Bertram has studied our electricity industry for decades. He says power companies’ profit-friendly accounting systems mean residential customers are being charged an excess of $1 billion annually.

most countries. In 1990, a unit of elec-tricity cost 9.1 cents. By 2013, it averaged 27.4 cents – a 300 per cent increase. Ac-cording to the Reserve Bank, inflation totalled 67 per cent over those 23 years. Labour has produced a graph from In-ternational Energy Agency data showing that New Zealand’s household power prices have risen faster than in any of the agency’s other 28 member countries.

Perhaps spurred by the new Labour/Green power policy and ongoing public disquiet about electricity prices, the Electricity Authority recently released

A waterfall near the hydroelectric power plant of Vemork, Norway. More than 98 per cent of the power Norway generates is through hydro stations, but the power it uses is 42 per cent fossil. It trades power with other European nations hungry for renewable energy.

Using Wolak’s work, the Commerce Commission found that between 2001 and 2007, each generator had periodically managed to bolster prices (termed exercising unilateral market power) to the tune of $4.3 billion (18 per cent of the value of the wholesale electricity market for the six and a half years studied) above what would have been charged in a truly com petitive environment.

This behaviour happened mostly in dry years. The commission proclaimed, “The exercise of market power is found to be both recurring and substantial.”

However, the commission also decided the hiking of prices had not been carried out for an anti-competitive reason, so nothing illegal had been done, and no further investigation was warranted. Charging high prices, without an anti-competitive purpose, is not a breach of the Commerce Act. The commission also decided Wolak need not proceed with a planned investigation into retail elec-tricity prices because he’d noted that when the gen-tailers boosted wholesale prices, they then gradually raised retail prices. I imagine the justification was

the differences between residential and industrial prices.”

In fact, this is completely erroneous because they give the US residential price as NZ27 cents, whereas in fact it’s 14.5 cents. The US industrial price (NZ8.3 cents per kWh) does nothing to promote its local argument. In Parliament on April 18, 2013, it was stated that New Zealand had the second-largest gap between resi-dential and industrial power prices in the OECD.

Power prices to Kiwi householders have risen much more sharply than in

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nothing illegal was being done. But gaining increasing revenue from

electricity sales has been only one Crown concern. Every government wants to re-duce unemployment and boost the econ-omy, so seeks low power prices for busi-ness. Recall the $30 million pulled out of the coffers in 2013 to keep Rio Tinto’s Tiwai Pt smelter buzzing. Yet since the Global Financial Crisis, electricity demand has weakened and last year, the country’s power consumption fell by one per cent.

Faced with a demand to make more money but protect jobs in a weak mar-ket, there’s really only one solution: raise prices for householders (who have little lobbying power) but keep them low for businesses – exactly what’s hap-pened. It’s likely successive govern-ments have encouraged SOEs to follow this path.

American Roy Hemingway, head of the supposedly independent Electricity Commission (the precursor of the Elec-tricity Authority), complained of intol-erable interference from Labour min-isters during his reign from 2003 to 2006. For instance, Hemingway spoke of a meeting with then-Energy Minister David Parker in June 2006 at which the minister read through several pages of notes outlining what he wanted the commission to do, including speeding up decision-making over the Waikato transmission line “and giving greater deference to Transpower”.

It’s not just the plurality of SOEs that has added to costs. Until the corporate reform era, the electricity supply chain was simply the NZ Electricity Department to power boards to consumers. Now we have generators, Transpower, retailers, lines companies, metering companies, regulators – all dining on consumers.

I suspect that government (Treasury, Labour and National) is much more complicit in electricity price rises for householders than is widely acknowl-edged. Governments have an insatiable thirst for money. Once ours embraced SOEs, they wanted higher dividends.

A window into this opened during the Solid Energy collapse in 2013. A 2009 letter tabled in Parliament from Treas-ury’s Crown Company Monitoring Unit recommended ministers “communicate a strong expectation that SOEs increase gearing and dividend yield”.

Two days later, the minister wrote to the head of Solid Energy saying he wanted all SOEs to increase their gear-ing (debt levels) and to “standardise and simplify the dividend policy for all SOEs to ensure that a more consistent share of profits is returned to the Crown as share holder”.

Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power would also have received the di-rective to increase dividend payments to government. As for the asset revalu-ations, government did little to rein in the process because, as the sole share-holder, it was the main beneficiary and

cause of high prices, do not appear to be the predominant factor in explaining the recurrent exercise of market power”.

In other words, the generators lie.

eaRlIeR, we NoTed that New Zealand lines charges are high. The reason, says Bertram, is because lines companies – descendants of the old electric power boards – have pulled a similar trick to the gen-tailers.

Between 1994 and 1999, revaluations doubled the value of lines company as-sets and in 2012 their assets were valued at $8.8 billion. Since 2003, the Com-merce Commission has taken an interest in lines charges, because although it’s now easy to switch power companies, lines are a local monopoly.

However, the commission has accepted their revaluations and allows them to increase prices so that they get a healthy return on asset values. Many businesses would welcome such a regulator.

In 2012, Auckland lines company Vector was ordered by the Commerce Commission to reduce prices by 10 per cent. Vector (once the Auckland Electric Power Board) now has additional inter-ests in gas and fibre optic cables. It has complained that although it reduced lines charges as commanded, electricity retailers did not pass this reduction on to consumers.

Lance Wiggs, the founder of electric-ity retailer Powerkiwi, writing about Vector in the National Business Review, commented, “any reasonable assump-tion for those numbers [earnings from Vector’s gas and technology operations] leaves an absurdly high margin for their electricity distribution business”.

And it’s not just generation and lines charges that have risen. Bertram has compared the cost of “retail services” in 1990 and 2010. These include retail-ers’ mark-ups, metering costs, market governance and market services. In 1990, these costs were 0.9 cents per kWh (in 2011 dollars), but 20 years later they were 8 cents for householders.

Of course, the very existence of a group of competing SOEs adds substantially to costs. Each has its own overpaid CEO (salaries run from $1 million to $1.5 mil-lion) and board, its own bureaucracy, its own logo-plastered fleet of cars, spin doctors, and marketing and advertising budget to compete against other SOEs. Cute televisual pukeko can’t come cheap.

are necessary to pay for new plant.

IN PR acTIce, the system is more complicated. For every trading period, each generator can submit multiple bids with different prices. Prices and amounts of power can be changed until half an hour before the trading period. But here’s the real kicker: the grid contains 52 “grid injection points”, usually power stations, where power is fed in, while on the other side, there are 196 grid exit points where power flows into local distribution networks. Prices vary between exit points, because the further electricity travels along cables, the more is lost. And in some places, transmission lines or transformers constrain the amount of power that can be moved, which can push up prices. Collectively, these 248 points are known as nodes. Transpower creates stacks for all nodes every 30 minutes!

The Commerce Commission also found that transmission constraints, “often cited by market participants as a

it builds what it terms a stack of sellers’ offers. Let’s say Meridian offers 1 GWh at $50 per MWh, Contact 0.8 GWh at $55, Genesis 0.7 GWh at $65, Mighty River 0.75 GWh at $72 and Trustpower 0.6 GWh at $78. Transpower accepts the Meridian, Contact and Genesis offers to get its 2 GWh requirement, but it will pay for all of that power at what’s termed the marginal rate of $65 per GWh – the highest price required to obtain the amount of power it needs. So in that timeslot, Trustpower and Mighty River earn zilch while Meridian does very nice-ly because, being a low-cost hydro pro-ducer, it was happy to get $50 for its power whereas it’s actually going to be paid $65.

This seems bizarre. When tenders are called for hospital supplies or road build-ing, the lowest tender wins. It’s this pric-ing system that underlies claims that generators make windfall profits. And it’s in the manipulation of this system that generators exercise market power. The generators retort that good profits

to preserve retail margins although, of course, the wholesalers and retailers are the same companies.

Wolak commented that unravelling the data took more effort than all similar investigations he had previously under-taken, namely in California, England, Wales, Australia, Colombia, Spain, Penn-sylvania, Maryland and New Jersey. Fair to say, labyrinthine complexity often masks either inefficiency, corruption or some other malfeasance.

ouR wHolesale electricity market – where the generating arms of the gen-tailers make their profits – is certainly complex.

Every day is divided into 48 half-hour trading periods, and for each period electricity retailers advise how much they want to buy; and sellers, how much they plan to generate and at what price. Transpower co-ordinates this market.

Imagine the period 10.30am to 11am tomorrow. Transpower knows retailers want to buy two GWh of electricity. Now

Mighty River Power’s chief executive Doug Heffernan and chair Joan Withers deliver the power-generating company’s annual result last August.

A hydroelectric power plant in Manitoba, Canada, in winter. Canada is a good comparison with New Zealand as it generates 60 per cent of its electricity from hydro. Yet its average residential power price is less than half the New Zealand average.

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IT’s THe desIRe to do something about inexorably rising power prices that has inspired the Green and Labour propos-als to establish a body – NZ Power – that would buy from generators on behalf of most consumers at prices that would give generators a fair but modest return. The plan is likely inspired by the claim businesses get low prices because as big users they can negotiate better deals. Who could have more negotiating heft than a single buyer taking most produc-tion? According to Labour’s plan, NZ Power would also be able to compel generators to produce electricity (thus removing market power from them), organise new generation capacity, and regulate and set prices.

Hostility to the new proposal has been widespread from business. Many claim it will destroy investor value and profits, and cast a pall over investment in all large-scale enterprises here. Might government intervene in other industries? The pro-posal has already undermined the prices obtained for the SOE share floats, some say by a billion-plus dollars.

Generators at the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, which supplies cheap, sustainable energy to a vast region. The dam itself was built and is managed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, one of the world’s largest public engineering agencies.

A ranch outside Burns, Oregon. The powerlines carry power from a Bonneville Power Administration plant, 400km north. Distribution charges are $US21.50 a month and power is a low US7 cents a unit for homes.

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much as expected has oozed out.Why do I pay twice as much for elec-

tricity as my friend Don in Virginia? Busi-ness will argue that New Zealand is small and the US is a market of 315 million. Having poked around the US quite a bit, I think it’s as parochial and “small” as New Zealand for the most part. It’s thou-sands of Burnses and occasional Auck-lands. They have probably got the mix between public service, competition and regulation better sorted in the electric-ity sector than we have.

Although we’re told that the operation of the free market – charge too much and somebody else will come in with a lower price and cut you out – will curb excess, it can be difficult to get a market operat-ing properly. It’s easy for a few players to unofficially co-operate in keeping prices high, hence the Commerce Com-mission’s preoccupation with anti-com-petitive behaviour.

Given the shortcomings of the free mar-ket, deft regulation by a disinterested regulator is required to control greed. Our electricity regulator – the government – has been neither disinterested nor de-termined, so our electricity industry has become a good place for it to make money, along with other generators, retailers, lines companies and the rest.

Recently, on Radio National’s Morning Report, there was talk of a new row over power charges. Labour, with a new-found amnesic rectitude, is claiming that Transpower is increasing payments to the government when it should be reduc-ing prices to consumers. Transpower correctly retorts that their prices are set by the Commerce Commission.

Expect more such stoushes – and con-sider generating your own power with rooftop solar panels. +

Just how much has government re-ceived in dividends from its electricity SOEs? From 2000 to 2013, it received $950 million from Mighty River (which had total revenue of $12.85 billion so 7.4 per cent of revenue); a stellar $3.47 billion from Meridian’s $25.35 billion (13.6 per cent); a paltry $282 million from Genesis’s $22.44 billion (1.25 per cent) and a solid $847 million from Transpower (8.8 per cent of its total revenue of $8.66 billion). Apart from Genesis, these results look pretty good.

Of course, the government also reaps 15 per cent GST and collects tax from all companies involved, including SOEs. Although the asset sales will diminish government revenue, the Crown will still be doing nicely out of electricity.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of rising power prices lies in Treasury records. Total revenue for the three SOE generators in 2000 was $1.51 billion, but by 2013, it had quadrupled to $6.1 billion. Over that time, power consumption rose from 38,000 GWh to 42,500 GWh, a mere 12 per cent increase (so there was little need for much new generation capacity) and inflation totalled 39 per cent.

Revenue for the three SOEs from 2000 to 2013 was an eye-watering $60.65 bil-lion, of which the government got only $4.7 billion. Genesis has invested some money in oil and gas, but it does seem as though government has been squeezing the toothpaste at the bottom and not as

But I wonder if there isn’t another rea-son industry opposes the idea of a single retail buyer. Recall the Electricity Au-thority was puzzled why industrial us-ers are apparently being undercharged. Perhaps householders are subsiding prices for business users and such sub-sidies might become difficult with the single-buyer model.

Although Bertram and Wolak’s find-ings have inspired the Left’s initiative, Wolak doesn’t agree with it, saying it’s likely to unleash new problems. He points out that a single buyer has little real power unless they can say “no” to a deal and NZ Power won’t be in that position. He favours tighter regulation of the monopolies (Transpower and lines companies) and real competition between gen-tailers.

To be fair, the government did make changes following the Commerce Com-mission’s 2009 report and a ministerial inquiry the same year. It forced some gen-tailers to shuffle generating plants to try and reduce opportunities for ex-ercising unilateral market power, and it was made easier for consumers to switch retailers. We now move between retail-ers with the aplomb of speed daters, a fact the government heralds as proof that our electricity market is ultra-competi-tive. Nonetheless, as with petrol, com-panies raise prices with the harmony of synchronised swimmers – and prices keep rising.

Wind – at five per cent – is a small but growing renewable energy source in New Zealand.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of rising power prices lies in Treasury records. Total revenue for the three SOE generators in 2000 was $1.51 billion, but by 2013, it had quadrupled to $6.1 billion.

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Power Failure