Griddy Barred from Texas Power Market for Payment Breach

I find this entire situation comical. First of all, who in their right mind thought that a good way to price electricity to consumers was through completely unhedged spot buys on a wholesale market? That’s just bananas. And then, when the market has a big excursion, as it is wont to do, everyone starts running around and screaming about how evil the market is, and how we have to bail all these people out. This just screams moral hazard.

Second, it seems like all these folks signed up for a demand-priced power plan with no concept that they should ... I dunno ... track the demand pricing. Presumably the price is just so low all the time that nobody bothers to look. However, something is fishy here. There’s one guy who is all over the news claiming he got a bill for $16k. From everything I’ve read, the market peaked at around $9 per kWh. Which is high. But for him to get that kind of bill, he would have had to burn over 1 MWh over the period of a couple of days when rates were that high. That is over twice what a typical California home uses in an entire month. Maybe his whole house is heated with electric baseboards, but again, it seems like he did nothing to conserve power.