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Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "How Power Companies Profited From Italy's Lockdown" video.
ENGINEER HERE - I wish I had seen this story when it first came out. What you have here is a variation of the Enron Strategy. Most people know that Enron collapsed after being caught doing various things. One of those things was market manipulation which they did by TURNING OFF power generating systems. The Enron Strategy relies on some basics of energy generation systems. 1) Most energy systems do NOT run at 100% and there's always some spare capacity in the system so that the next person to turn on a light doesn't collapse the system. So among the power supply companies there's reserve capacity and if its in a system that is already powered up and running then it costs very little to fuel that reserve capacity. So it can be very profitable to sell the reserve capacity if it can be sold. 2) There are 2 power spikes in every modern society every day. There's 1 in the morning when people wake up and start turning things on as well as business starting up and turning more things on. There's a second spike starting in the late afternoon when people start going home and turning stuff on. So if you can create a shortage of supply that's timed when people want more power not only can you sell the reserve capacity but you can sell it and any other energy you sell into the energy market AT HIGHER PRICES . Enron were caught DELIBERATELY TURNING OFF power generators claiming it was just faults and failures. That caused the energy markets to spike and Enron profited by sell energy at much higher profit margins. Its called market manipulation and its illegal and Enron got caught.
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I'm an Australian engineer and I have been trying to explain that since 2016 when I had a small project into Australia's future energy needs. The single biggest problem we have is that engineers get no say. Just this week I saw the ABC 7:30 report on one story and they had 3 experts and they were all economists. Over on Sky same thing. If you look at the CSIRO report it was written by economists. If you look at the LNP report it was done by British Economists. The idea to privatise everything came from economists. For somethings it might be a success, but for infrastructure, water and electricity its been a disaster all across the World. To cover up their mistake economists are grabbing the microphone at every opportunity and NOT letting anyone else speak or be heard. Did you know that the recent CSIRO report on nuclear was done by economists? Did you know that the recent LNP report on nuclear was done by economists? Did you know that our energy regulator is dominated by economists? Did you know the government advisors, Think Tanks energy experts and energy consultants are all economists?
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