Utilities

[danbrotherston]

I don't think the province actually has any ability to dictate mergers to utilities.

That said, theoretically you can be more effective managing a larger system than a smaller one as your management overhead will be less. But it would be a fairly small savings, and I don't really see how else this level of scaling-up would make the utilities more efficient. Surely the cost of their purchases of electricity would not drop.

As an aside, I don't know London Hydro at all but higher rates there don't necessarily mean that it's badly run. It's quite possible that they are charging higher rates in order to pay for a higher level of infrastructure repairs, maintenance or upgrades (pretty much with what happened with the hydro costs at the provincial level, the rates shot up because the original rates could not sustain the system's aging infrastructure and capital investments).

Sometimes scale makes things more efficient, but not always.  I was under the impression that the Kitchener-Wilmot grid was relatively operationally distinct from the Waterloo-North grid, combining them might have some savings in some types of overhead, but internally, you're going to have to manage the same physical infrastructure distinctions.  Building the whole system together might have been more efficient, but that ship has sailed and we have the infrastructure that exists today...

And bigger systems aren't without cost as well.