[mcdonje]

Saying they're "providing a service" by turning off in peak times is kind of a ridiculous phrasing. Normal consumers in normal markets don't buy at peak because peak pricing is quite expensive. Flipping the equation to paying people to not buy something and calling it a service is outrageous. It exposes the grid as something that literally cannot work on free market principles. People are right to be outraged.

[wc-]

This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.

[mcdonje]

I get how the grid works. You don't get the market failure. In a normal market, consumers aren't service providers unless they happen to also sell something separate from what they're buying. They're using a service. Sellers ostensibly take a risk that demand won't be sufficient.

With the grid, that's unacceptable. So there's an absurd solution of paying customers to influence their buying behavior, and even calling them 'service providers'. In a normal market, you charge more or less to steer consumer behavior, like what they do for human customers.

In this 'market', the government is providing much of the capital and the businesses are not taking on all of the risk. And some 'customers' are necessary to make the product work.

This is not an appropriate scenario for a free market. It's actually impossible for it to function as a free market.