It’s important to note, however, that this “total contract value”—the phrase Enron was using to keep score—bore no relation to either revenues or profits. The term merely represented Enron’s calculation of the cost of all the energy and infrastructure needs a customer had outsourced to EES over the life of the contract. If Enron agreed to supply $500 million worth of electricity to a large corporation over a ten-year period, that $500 million was included as part of the total value of the contract, even if Enron was likely to lose money on the sale. But the number was still useful to the
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