Electricity Markets Transactions

Vincent Kaminski

Electricity markets cover a number of specialised products and services that are largely invisible to the public. An average consumer of electricity is naturally concerned with the price of kWh, but does not realise how complex is the machinery that delivers energy to their house with an exceptional level of reliability (at least in the developed countries).We find it sometimes surprising that most people in Western Europe and the US seem to assume that electricity has been available forever. In reality, electricity has become available relatively recently in many places. The author’s mother remembered the year (1926) when power lines were extended to the country house in central Poland where she grew up. An executive of one of the largest utilities in the US told me about his experience of growing up as a boy without electricity in rural Texas. The Hill Country in central Texas was eventually electrified in the late 1930s and early 1940s through the efforts of Lyndon Johnson. Prior to electrification, the lives of farmers in this part of the US were quite difficult:¹¹http://www.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his1693/lcra.html.

Running water was impossible without