[imtringued]

>Essentially the effect of what you’re saying is poor people would be priced out of an essential utility to ensure rich people get a stable supply.

No, that's not the case. The entire point of a market system is to encourage people to use the limited resources on the most critical needs first. However, since there is a fixed rate culture the end result is that everyone wastes energy on non essential needs.

There simply aren't enough rich people on the planet to steal all the 75GW and even if they did they would be broke in the end. I don't know where you got that idea. The rich are in the minority. Also, you're forgetting that rich people will waste more energy if their rates are artificially kept lower.

[Robotbeat]

Besides that, supply IS elastic in the longer term. So if the rich were able to bid the price up, there would be folks able to make a bunch of money selling power to them, reducing the cost. And that opportunity should be available to most people. If we had standardized feed-in capability on smart meters, whole house generators, solar roofs and batteries, or even cars could sell electricity on the grid when the wholesale price got insane.

Poor folks would be insulated from the large swings in price by the 25-50% guaranteed price portion of the power supply. (And you could make the price guarantee portion progressive by making it a constant 3kW (averaged over an hour) or whatever regardless of house size, so smaller houses would have much more of their electricity at a fixed rate than larger houses.)