I'm originally from South Australia and was a resident during...

I'm originally from South Australia and was a resident during the privatisation up to only 6 months ago when I headed to Sydney. I laugh at the scare mongering.

The wholesale price of power, i.e. the price generators such as the operator of CETO gets, and what the end consumer pays is two different things.

In the eastern states (SA, NSW, VIC, QLD, Snowy and more recently TAS) all participate in the National Electricity Market. Each generator will make a bid on how much power it will sell and at what cost, and for each pool these prices are stacked until demand is meet.

NSW generators are already participating in this market place, they have been since 1998-99 when the NEM was set up.

During privatisation, generally it is the transmission companies and retailers that bump the prices up. Most of the eastern states have had Full Retail Contestibility (FRC) for a number of years where you can select your electricity retailer hence there is competition.

The problem is probably the Monopoly transmission company (Power Grid). It makes it hard to have any competition here, if you did you would need two power grids in each street. But this is not to say this sector is not heavily regulated.

In South Australia the government prior to sale deliberately didn't spend much on capital infrastructure on the "ETSA power grid", ran it into the ground, then they overinflated the price and sold it to CKI Holdings.

Naturally when they got it, they found out they paid too much more it and had to spend a lot of money to bring it back up to a satisfactory level. If the grid was maintained while in public hands, this could have been avoided.

There was aso a hot spell at one stage, and AGL at the time who was the dominate retailer didn't have adequate hedging contracts in place, so they were buying power on the spot markets.

So there were a few variables going on, that people use for scare mongering.

But in the terms of the Wholesale Electricity market and wholesale prices, I doubt one bit that it will have an effect.

If you take a look at Annual Wholesale Prices for the SA pool they are :

1998-1999 $156.02
1999-2000 $59.27
2000-2001 $56.39
2001-2002 $31.61
2002-2003 $30.11
2003-2004 $34.86
2004-2005 $36.07
2005-2006 $37.76
2006-2007 $51.61
2007-2008 $49.10

If anything the lack of water to cool plants such as Loy Lang in VIC and Tarong and Tarong North power stations in Queensland, that is driving up prices on the NEM. SA imports power from other pools on the NEM. However it is all supply and demand, and if they build more generators then the price normally drops.