The ERCOT maket is stupidly designed - it excluded demand from shed load from pricing calculations. This caused the price of electricity to drop to a point where it was uneconomical for many gas power plants to operate (because of the high spot price of gas)

The immediate ramp to the $9000 cap was designed to alleviate this. Yes, it's boneheaded, but I imagine any other manual override of the algorithm would have taken longer to get people to agree to.

The conclusion I keep coming to is that so many free market maximalists are absolutely terrible at designing markets.