[TrackerFF]

Can anyone tell me: Why is there no automatic stop-limit the customers can opt into?

Once the $/KWh passes some threshold, power either gets turned off, or they get some short grace period to figure out whether they want to continue or stop.

Price runs like these are things consumers will experience probably a handful of times in their lifetimes. If they run wild, they can financially ruin someone. In the grand scheme of things, these are black-swan events. There should be safety guards in place.

[_jal]

Creating complicated pricing automation for home consumers for rare situations when they're exposed to brutal pricing in a life-or-death crisis is not the solution. If anything, you'll be causing more chaos, as people grapple with rules they don't remember setting up.

The safety guards tend to be laws saying, "you can't sell those". Consumer utilities should be boring and predictable, and need to be legally controlled to stay that way.

[bluGill]

Because nobody thought they would need it until it was too late.

Note that everyone at risk of this even was told beforehand to switch providers now, so there was an "easy out" if you were paying attention (In theory easy, in practice, while it isn't never easy). Or you could have turned your own power off - When you get a time of use contract the point is you want to adjust your demand to fit the price, so anyone who got a large bill failed to do their end of the bargain.