What's behind those$15,000 electricity bills in Texas

Here's another paradox worth thinking about when trying to have incentive-only regulations (carrots without sticks.)

You might think that higher rates would incent companies to weatherize, but actually they perversely might reduce incentives... if you owned 100 power plants, of which some will work in an emergency and some won't, all you need is for the fraction that are weatherized to get enough surplus revenues during peak times to cover for the plants that are offline so that your overall revenues are flat or slightly higher. Higher electricity rates actually reduce your need to weatherize your plants.

While pricing power based off the market rate does not seem like a bad idea. The problem I see is that you don't see the price till you have used it. I don't see how you could let consumers quickly know of large price changes so they would know to conserve.

It's not like your light switch has a screen that says it will cost current "$x.xx" per minute to turn this light on. Same for outlets it's not like they tell the consumer that the current device running on it is costing "$x.xx" per minute.

For such a thing it would need to be real time for consumers to react to the market. Not here is you bill by the way.

The modern tragedy of government at any scale is the inability of small-minded people to accept the fundamental paradox of Capitalism: that it is _simultaneously_ the best system for arbitration of price and one of the worst forms of government.

It is no accident that all the remaining first-world nations have a very similar setup: a healthy free-market nucleus operating inside of a strong pro-social shell.

Freedom isn't free.