Transforming Power The Politics of Electricity Planning

This book is an exploration and analysis of the electricity industry framed by a broader question: how do fundamental but complex institutions make long-term plans in a climate uncertainty? The book examines five well-known Australian, Canadian and New Zealand cases including the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam in Tasmania and Victoria's Loy Yang project, Ontario Hydro's nuclear expansion and BC Hydro's Peace River Site C project and the Clyde Dam in New Zealand. The book closely analyses the ways in which various agencies have sought ends to serve the means at their disposal. Economies of scale have meant that electricity has long been regarded as a natural monopoly, but questions of privatisation, regulation and government control are increasingly becoming prevalent. The book explores these issues as well as noting the experiences of other countries such as France, the UK and the USA in its analysis of institutional reform. The book presents a case in which the needs of private utilities, private consumers, industry, government and the environment rarely coincide. Aynsley Kellow argues for new approaches to electricity planning, which offer much by way of economic savings and minimisation of environmental problems such as global warming. His insightful book will be important to those working within electricity utilities as well as to economists, public administrators and environmentalists.