Some "leaked" evidence has emerged regarding allegations that Enron did work with the then PC government to implement a clause into Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) without public consultation. The clause at the root of the problem is whether any government legislation makes PPA contracts "more unprofitable" (instead of unprofitable) for the PPA owner. In the event new legislation results in a more unprofitable contract, the PPA holder would have the ability to return the contract back to the balancing pool putting Albertans at risk for unprofitable contracts. With the NDP's recent desire to implement emission taxes, PPA holders including Enmax, ATCO, TransCanada and AltaGas returned already unprofitable contracts to balancing pool citing this clause.
If the NDP was truly aware of this clause before announcing their climate change, why not try to pro-actively deal with this instead of dragging this through the media and courts? One thing is for certain, lawyers will get paid and the public will pay for the losses in some sort of fashion. (Enmax's largest shareholder is the city of Calgary)
What is interesting is whether or not Blockchain and smart contracts could help solve this problem? I think, at a minimum, it would bring more transparency to the table and I like the idea of the contract to be written in code and executed which I feel reduces the amount of opportunities for discrepancies.