The consumer advocate agency potentially has a much greater role in the duel’s next round. The focus will tighten onto practical matters: costs of the transmission projects, how the expenses will be covered, and whether Albertans face paying any premiums to subsidize stringing new wires that do double duty as delivery routes for previously impossible power exports.

Gashus comes armed with industry experience. She began her career with Imperial Oil Ltd. She then rose into senior roles in power and telecommunications services.

She vows that her agency’s 20 employees and reserves of expert consultants will keep close tabs on the transmission line case. Part of her office’s job is to translate services and regulation into plain language that makes sense to the public, she says. But the mandate is also to marshal consumer interests into effective interventions in the regulatory process – including, if necessary, visiting cabinet ministers to ensure they understand the effects of utility policies, she adds.

The second major issue on her agency’s horizon is a sleeper with potential to become hotter than the power line tangle. A change is coming that will touch all Alberta consumers directly, and not just landowners along the routes for construction of new wires and towers. As of mid-2010, provincial energy deregulation policy will largely eliminate an 11-year-old shelter against market gyrations in monthly average electricity prices.

Known as the regulated rate option, or RRO for short, the complicated shield will linger on only as a default rule meant to ensure no one freezes in the dark. Power service will continue for consumers who persist in refusing to choose supply contracts with competitive retailers operating on open markets and offering deals that are not controlled by the utilities commission. But RRO prices will cease to be a strictly managed, slowly changing blend of long- and short-term power costs. Consumer billings will become simple projections of monthly average prices in the highly changeable Alberta Power Pool.

As the centerpiece of provincial deregulation policy, the pool is an open wholesale market prone to rapid daily and even hourly movements. Trading is driven by unpredictable variations in supply from power stations and demand by electricity users across the province. The pool is affected by a wide range of factors, from economic activity to weather, performance of generating equipment, capacity on the transmission grid and the availability of imports.

Alberta learned the hard way about the complexities of retail energy deregulation after embarking on the policy in the late 1990s. Headaches developed over even the basic first step – “unbundling” power and natural gas service to separate the freely traded commodities from wire and pipeline delivery franchises that continued to be regulated as monopolies.’

Disclosures of elements in household and business energy services that were formerly sold as single packages created a “deregulated billing issue” that kept utilities, retailers and provincial agencies hopping just trying to explain the system. “Lots of Albertans did not understand the new bills that arrived on their doorsteps and it has taken a long time to become comfortable with them,” Gashus recalls.

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