Alright, sounds pretty good – and hey, they’re regulated. Let’s go on.
The website goes on to say that they invest in “hydroelectric, wind, and solar power facilities, and sustainable utility distribution businesses.” To help with that distribution they own Liberty Utilities, which serves over 74,000 customers in ten states – Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, Texas…and now #12, Montana!
We’ll join 22 water distribution and wastewater facilities, two electricity distribution hubs, and five natural gas installations. I’m telling you, Liberty Utilities has a lot of shit!
All of that shit helps drive up Algonquin’s stock price, which is listed as AQN and closed up 1.35 points today to finish at 8.98. There are tens of millions of those shares out there with a total market cap of just under $2 billion. And the biggest shareholders? That would be Emera Incorporated, which owns 50 million shares, or just under 25% of the company.
So who the hell is Emera Incorporated? They’re a energy and services company that was formed from Nova Scotia Power Incorporated at the tail-end of 1998. Yep, deregulation, something that allowed this holding company to come into being, one that could now trade shares on the stock market, driving up its value and making the top brass rich.
In case you haven’t guessed it by now, Algonquin ain’t much different from what we had.
From a business standpoint this is unfortunate – they’re trying to make money while providing a service, and this city government came in and tried to seize their assets. Instead of going through a long and drawn-out court battle, this company instead decided to sell those assets – perhaps at a loss – just so it didn’t have to deal with it anymore.
Now, Carlyle and Mountain Water have been having some serious problems in California, but a lot of that comes down to the drought there.
From the City of Missoula’s point of view – and by that I mean the people – it just means one corporate controller has handed off the ball to another. We’re still sucking from the corporate teat on this one, it just happens to be that this teat is a bit smaller and less ample.
Algonquin Power and Utilities has operating revenue of $252.6 million, or $276.6 million in Canadian Dollars. Their net income in American dollars is $21.3 million and their total assets are $1.17 billion.
In comparison, Carlyle’s operating revenue of $4.41 billion, net income of $1.34 billion, and total assets of $35.6 billion.
Damn, that’s a lot of money…more than enough for the lawyers to argue over, if they’ve still got the guns to go after a large company.