[guyzero]

From the article: "Consumers who aren’t exposed to price risk have no fundamental incentives to conserve energy in times of need."

But, at the same time, consumers that have no visibility into their current electricity prices are unable to alter their behaviour. Until there's extremely high-resolution, real-time price transparency, this system is destined to fail.

Also consumers have base loads just like generators have base loads: you might defer doing laundry, but no one is going to unplug their refrigerator during a electricity price surge. Again, this simplistic spot pricing scheme is destined to fail if it doesn't meet consumer's need to have predictable baseline consumption rates.

I weakly agree with the author here that demand-based pricing is in everyone's interest, but that said, last week in Taxas was a systemic failure of immense proportions and everyone involved in planning Texas' electricity grid should be ashamed.