Enron’s market-manipulating machinations to the side, almost all contemporary electricity traders engage in forms of electricity arbitrage (buying cheap here, selling dear there) made possible by the critical combination of the Internet and the Energy Policy Act. This way of making money on power may have been first exploited by Enron—in the late 1990s, 25 percent of all energy trading in the United States was being conducted via EnronOnline—but it also brought competition to the market in a way never before seen. The unfortunate side effect of this was to make the flow of information less
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