"I haven't looked at the Liddell case in detail, but the practice of taking capacity off market so that a company benefits at the cost of the local community and employees and the often the wider community may be legal but it is certainly not ethical. "
@tanon
Respectfully, that's not the situation at all here.
What is happening here is that, instead of AGL allocating capital to extending the life of Liddell, it is committing shareholder funds to developing new energy generation, which is more environmentally friendly.
If Liddell was to remain operational, then AGL would not be able to justify the capital investment in those new generation technologies.
And generating an acceptable return on shareholder capital is the prerogative of AGL, just as it is for any publicly-listed company.
The AGL directors have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of the owners of the company, which is exactly what they are doing in this case.
But the energy generation sector in Australia is a free market, and AGL is not doing anything whatsoever to prevent its competitors (or new participants, for that matter) from building new generation capacity to compete with AGL and keep the market adequately supplied.
So I'm not sure what AGL is doing that even warrants any mention of a question of ethics.
(PS. I have no vested interest here, as I speak as someone who is not an AGL shareholder.)
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