[mlyle]

If there's insufficient power after a disaster for all homes to be heated, you have to make a decision about where the power goes somehow. If you just let everyone demand all the normal amount of power, you're going to have to completely turn off a bunch of customers and the decision is going to be pretty arbitrary.

Obviously regulators should make sure these are very, very rare events (by requiring sufficient overprovisioning and redundancy vs. failure scenarios).

There are all kinds of market outcomes in a situation like this that we might not like (and might take actions to fix to some extent). But without a market and price mechanisms involved in allocating the scarce resource, you're going to get worse outcomes.