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How about severe penalties for breaching your SLAs? Can't deliver power? Give customers $X per minute of downtime.

Now let's see you assess your risk when it comes to installing heaters and insulation.

Financial solutions like this have proven to perform poorly with 'black swan' events. Pressure from stakeholders and people who decry 'waste' (i.e. "slack in the system") when there hasn't been one of these rare events in recent memory leads to cutting 'unnecessary' costs. After all, people have reason to be wary if a power plant builder in Ecuador argues that they should spend millions of dollars preparing for subzero temperatures. At best they're viewed as a paranoid prepper, at worst a fearmongering profiteer.

Then when one of these rare events happens, and now thousands of people are owed tons of money, either insurance pays out, or the government bails out the power company, or the power company goes bankrupt (or is forced to make cuts in other areas). In none of these outcomes has the SLA achieved its goal of ensuring that consumers have more-reliable access to power. Some of them may be richer for their suffering, but some of them are also dead.

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