D-Day is at hand, and the barefoot sons of Nostradamus are wandering the concrete canyons, muttering: “Prepare to meet thy doom.”

D-Day is deregulation day — Jan. 1, 2001, when Alberta’s electricity industry floats free to ride the winds of the open retail market.

Scary? Damn right.

This is a lot more complex than getting used to the locally-owned beer store down the street. THAT type of deregulation we could grasp.

Five years ago, the price of power was about 15 bucks a megawatt hour. Last September’s average price? Try $176.28/MWh.

Industrial power consumers are getting bills the size of Bill Gates’ paycheque. No wonder they’re sweating bullets.

One thing seems clear. Consumer pleas to postpone the Jan. 1st date will go nowhere. This ball was set rolling four years ago and nothing will stop it now. Accepting that reality, a visit to the Power Pool of Alberta seemed like a reasonable idea.

Call Power Pool CEO Lorry Wilson for an interview, and a guy named Wayne St. Amour will get back to you.

Calm as a priest, chummy as a next-door neighbour, St. Amour is the pool’s VP of customer and corporate services. Naturally, he puts a soothing spin on this stuff.

You don’t have to buy his pitch. But it can’t hurt to listen.

The pool occupies the 18th floor of a nondescript building on 4th Avenue S.W., and operates as spot market for electrical power, matching up buyers and sellers.

It also controls the provincial balance of supply and demand, importing juice from B.C. or Saskatchewan when local supplies run short.

A third function is market surveillance — guarding against “anti-competitive behaviour” in the power market, like a securities commission.

Calgary energy lawyer Howard Ward is the Market Surveillance Administrator, and you can give him a B-minus for his report last week. He let producers off the hook for runaway prices, but did, at least, suggest climbing gas prices don’t really explain the high cost of power generated by coal-fuelled plants.

But back to St. Amour’s spin.

“Right now, we’re playing catch-up on the supply side,” he conceded the obvious. “But another 2,000 megawatts of new plants are coming on the (provincial) system, of which about half that will be available in the next 12-18 months.”

To put that in perspective, the province uses about 7,000 megawatts a year. “Until then, supply will be tighter than it has been historically,” St. Amour continued.

On the up side, he maintains that high prices will bring in more players, more generators, thereby increasing competition.

“Bringing new generators on has a downward effect on price,” he said in a classic summary of free-market theory.

“Under the old rules, there was no incentive to be in balance with supply and demand,” he said. “You just kept building supply as long as you could — that’s how utility companies gained their revenues. They were given a guaranteed rate of return on their investment.

“Whereas today, you have to have a buyer before you can put product into the market. Deregulation is how you get the best deals for consumers.”

St. Amour predicts the onset of a blizzard of innovative schemes and technologies; new producers setting up portable generators; and continuing interest in power generated by wind turbines, such as the three years’ worth of breeze-juice bought by Shell Canada last month.

There it is. You can swallow the pitch, or not.

From the small consumer’s vantage, one modest way to defend yourself against Big Power is by figuring out how the system works.

The Power Pool Web site isn’t a bad place to start sorting through this tangle. Here’s the address: www.powerpool.ab.ca.

We’ll find out soon enough whether the Market Surveillance Administrator packs any clout.

To avoid becoming a laughingstock, Ward will have to serve as the consumer’s auditor-general.

He’ll need the cojones of a matador, and the whistle-blowing integrity of Ralph Nader.

Otherwise, everyone’s gonna get scorched.