Some industrial customers like datacenters have strict availability agreements with customers and won't be able to accept prolonged cutoffs.
Forcing non residential customers like these to curtail their use would likely end up driving the industry (and corresponding tax revenue) elsewhere.
But what you're talking about does already exist, and it's called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/...
But that's not the way our legal and political system actually works.
Edit: I’ve interpreted the second part of your comment as an objection to the first part, but if that wasn’t the intended message it’s my bad :)
I'm suggesting that what I think ought to be the way the world works in fact is not the way it actually works.
This is a criticism of our current system, not using it as a reason to dismiss the idea of changing it to something better.
Unless it's already built, it's rather expensive to rebuild.
We don't have the collective power to save everyone, and if we overextend ourselves trying to do that, then there is a risk that the whole system collapses for everyone, or partially collapses and causes more pain than might have happened without spreading ourselves too thin.
We obviously need to struggle to make a good world for everyone, but nature is fucking brutal and it doesn't care about our sense of ethics.
Except we do? We have plenty of resources if they were distributed more evenly. In this particular example, other states are able to provide energy during rare events because they did not choose to go with a pure market based system. They aren’t on the verge of collapse.
Grid operators only see the costs they don’t see the benefits thus an inefficient allocation of resources is guaranteed.
(The lower rates were not just from ‘efficient markets’ but also it being possible for high cost producers such as steam turbine coal fired power plants to go bankrupt in the fracked gas age w/o bankrupting the whole utility.)