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A comment on The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up. Parent comment

Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by erincandescent on Thursday January 20, 2022 @11:13AM (#30010792)
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.

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Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by caseysoftware on Thursday January 20, 2022 @03:21PM (#30014216)
> The conclusion I keep coming to is that so many free market maximalists are absolutely terrible at designing markets.

There's wisdom in this statement but a better phrasing would replace "free market maximalists" to "humans."

Anyone who thinks they can "design a market" assumes all rational, predictable (aka not-human) actors.

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