There’s no “free market” for electricity anywhere in the developed world, including Texas. In the US, the grid is centrally planned by several regional transmission organizations. In Texas that’s ERCOT. An artificial market, a bid-auction system, is used to decide the actual price of electricity at any given moment. But in the case of ERCOT they concluded that, because outages prevent generators from making money during periods of peak demand, generators had adequate incentives to invest in reliability without a separate capacity market. And that worked fine for decades!
It’s not a choice of “free market versus regulation.” It’s a heavily regulated market. The question is only about the design of the regulatory scheme.
I don't think they can charge whatever they like. There are some regulations on the max price a generator charge for electricity, which we hit during the last freeze.
I heard about people paying over $10/kWH and having $15k bills for about 5 days of power. I know people who paid well over $1000 for the month and their power was out for much of the cold spell (~50%). I hear they're going to try and lower billing to less than $9000/MWh, but that's not going to encourage building proper infrastructure, and making gouging profitable doesn't encourage any of them to improve reliability. Why bother weatherproofing?
I'm reminded of Enron's "grandma Millie" comments.
It’s not a choice of “free market versus regulation.” It’s a heavily regulated market. The question is only about the design of the regulatory scheme.