[AnthonyMouse]

Except that there are ways to get the protection somewhere else, in ways that are potentially advantageous.

The most obvious one would be to just disconnect your house from the grid whenever prices exceed some threshold that only actually happens once a decade.

Even if that means you go stay in a hotel, doing that once every ten years for thousands of dollars in savings over the same period could be totally worth it. And there are also even less inconvenient alternatives, like buying a generator for less than you save in electricity and using it during price spikes, which means you also get a "free" generator to use during ordinary power outages.

Meanwhile it helps the grid because people who are willing to do this voluntarily remove load during crunch time and prevent the need to do rolling blackouts that unexpectedly freeze people's pipes.

[tunesmith]

I think there's one other aspect though which is similar to insurance - you can't time the "bad times" and they can come at the most inconvenient times, including when you do not have the wherewithal to trigger your various backup plans.

Generators automatically notice when the regular power goes off, but I don't know if they can automatically notice when prices rise above a certain threshold.