You may be right- it's very hard to imagine that normal people really wanted to be exposed to that kind of downside.
But also it reminds me of the kind of articles you see from time to time where someone bought a cut-rate airfare, and then got bumped or had some other inconvenient change and was upset that they had no recourse. But of course the whole reason that fare existed was because the buyer was agreeing they could be bumped.
So if the options are fixed rate power that is cut when the utility doesnt want to pay the spot price, or wholesale power that stays on but exposes the buyer to the spot price and is usually cheaper than the fixed rate, I start to imagine that there is a market for that. And that like the airfares, people are happy to take the upside but cry not fair when stuck with the downside.
It depends on the product. It's viewed as perfectly fine to buy and sell futures contracts on global commodities without protection, because the people doing that know what they're doing. It's likewise OK to sell win chances on lottery or slot machine payouts, because the customer is presumed to understand the risks well.
But not everything is like that. In particular household utilities aren't elastic things: people need them in a way they don't need to gamble. So the government needs to be regulating this on our behalf, because it's not reasonable to assume everyone knows the weatherproofing state of the Texas power grid.
That doesn't mean that no consumer ability to exploit spot power should exist. I mean, there are similar products envisioned like "charge overnight" for EVs that seem safe.
But the idea that somehow consumers were going to be so sophisticated as to manage their risk to tolerate a $10k electric bill is just bananas.
Another option would have been to require to have a sensible cost cutoff point (smart grid). It would have been more expensive to implement, but a great compromise.
It's basically the problem of tail risk aka "picking up pennies in front of a steam roller". I'm not against it per se, but it does make sense that consumers be informed of it when making a decision, be it writing options or buying electricity at spot rates.
You may be right- it's very hard to imagine that normal people really wanted to be exposed to that kind of downside.
But also it reminds me of the kind of articles you see from time to time where someone bought a cut-rate airfare, and then got bumped or had some other inconvenient change and was upset that they had no recourse. But of course the whole reason that fare existed was because the buyer was agreeing they could be bumped.
So if the options are fixed rate power that is cut when the utility doesnt want to pay the spot price, or wholesale power that stays on but exposes the buyer to the spot price and is usually cheaper than the fixed rate, I start to imagine that there is a market for that. And that like the airfares, people are happy to take the upside but cry not fair when stuck with the downside.