[AnthonyMouse]

Competitive free markets for electricity don't exist in general, because the last mile transmission is a natural monopoly. A monopoly isn't a competitive free market. That's the same reason the government itself is so bad at everything -- it's a monopoly that doesn't have to respond to competitive pressure.

Generation can be a competitive market. It's not a natural monopoly. But it's interfacing with the one for last mile power transmission.

The problem you have then is that it's susceptible to regulatory corruption and incompetence. That's not the same thing as "insufficient and lax regulation." The problem isn't that the regulation was lacking in intensity. There isn't a volume knob where you can turn up the general amount of regulation and solve the problem. You need to fix the specific defect. Adding a bunch of other irrelevant rules does nothing.

In California that defect was that the generating companies bought up their competitors and purposely shut down a lot of generating capacity because the regulations were written in such a way that they could only charge high prices during a supply shortfall. So they manufactured one.

There are different ways to handle that. It was plausibly a violation of existing antitrust laws, so the problem wasn't even a lack of regulation, it was a lack of enforcement. The monopoly could have used a different pricing structure that pays generators a given amount to maintain idle generating capacity in case of a shortfall, causing it to be more profitable to not destroy existing generating capacity. Or any number of alternatives.

None of this is incompatible with the idea of having a competitive market for power generation. And it's also still not the thing that happened in Texas.