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[quote user="Lee Koch"]   JSGreen wrote: "(Perhaps the aviation industry would be a better analogy for the Captive shipper discussuion, since there are lots of little airports with only one carrier serving them.) And there are parallels with OA, since there is no "Natural Monopoly" for Air Carriers. Yet, there seems to be lots of little towns (read, "Small SHippers") that pay higher prices or find alternate means to transport the commodities.(People)." You are right. Why compare railroads with a utility? It's like comparing apples with potatoes! When making an analogy, we should stick within the genre: transportation. How does RR-freight compare with air-cargo? Anybody know if you have to pay premium prices for air freight from a small airport as compared to a larger one? To use your analogy, JS, if I want to fly from Germany to London, I can drive to Frankfurt Airport and get a flight with almost any carrier. I wont get a ticket for under $100, but I'll get a direct flight into Heathrow or Gatwick, which in turn allows me every possible means of ground transportation into the city. There is a budget airline called Ryan Air which flies from Altenburg-Noebitz (a small town about 30 miles south of Leipzig) to London-Stansted. Both airports can only be reached by car or taxi, but I get a one-way flight for $20! Now, as far as I know, Ryan Air is the only airline to serve these airports (i.e. captive shipper), but the flight is one fifth of the price. [/quote] One big difference in trying to compare small airports with captive rail shippers - airports are owned by the local government, so there is always the option of ditching the current airline in favor of a new airline, e.g. a better comparison would be the franchise model of OA with small airports. The utility comparison is apt because other energy companies, in the form of either utilities or merchant energy providers (e.g. 3rd party), are able to transport their product over the transmission lines of any other utility.  That is the gist of OA, and in the utility sector is showing gains in overall industry productivity.  Too bad we in the energy industry are now being saddled with expensive renewable mandates on top of the spector of CO2 taxation, such idiocies are not allowing us to show the value of OA in terms of customer pricing.
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