Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.
I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.
This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.
Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.
I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.
In Austin's cade, Austin Energy built out way too much off of essential circuits. Office buildings stayed lit because they trunked off a circuit feeding medical centers, emergency services, that type of thing.
So the only place Austin Energy could go for load shedding was their residential customer base. Even then; they didn't execute true "rolling" blackouts, because that implies dividing the supply of power you have somewhat evenly across your entire customer population in a reasonable time based multiplexing scheme so that everyone gets their chance to run the heat. To minimize the amount of time people go without any heat, and at regular intervals so people can plan their consumption.
Can't speak for other metroplexes, and the co-op I get power from did a perfect job.