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By Fred Kerr

I don’t always agree with Mayor Naheed Nenshi, but I am fully aligned with him on one issue. Nenshi has described the NDP government’s lawsuit against Alberta power companies as “outrageous.” He is absolutely right.

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Back in 2000, the then-Progressive Conservative government negotiated power purchase agreements (PPAs) with the power generators that included a clause allowing them to exit their agreements if the government changed the rules in a way that made the contracts unprofitable or more unprofitable.

As Enmax has pointed out, all parties to those agreements knew what was in them. Rachel Notley’s NDP regime has a responsibility to understand those contracts, especially when they decided to accelerate the phase out of coal-fired generation, Alberta’s cheapest source of electricity.

The potential for such a sudden, massive change in regulation is exactly why the power generators insisted on having those clauses in their agreements 16 years ago.