With food, it's possible to manage supply through stockpiling. With electricity, storage is tricky, so when there's a change to supply, demand has to be changed to match. You can do that with blackouts or economics. Many large customers have contracts where they pay a lower rate in exchange for disconnecting their load when needed to reduce demand. Anything essential would be on another meter that has a higher rate.
Why is it a problem to apply the same principle to residential connections?
Of course, in my area, most of my utility outages are a result of interrupted lines and not supply issues, both essential and non-essential would be equally disrupted. And, it's not feasible to switch a significant number of residences to a two-meter system in any reasonable amount of time, so this is firmly in the thought expirement category.
WELL PUT.. the logic on this debate is astonishly bad..
"Charge more for essential services" just sounds terrible and you are correct, inelastic demand needs to be affordable, and subsidized if it is NOT affordable.
i dont understand how someone would advocate that "essential services has higher value to me and should cost more".
Essential services like heating my home does not have a higher value, it is an absolutely essential service to prevent death from cold temperatures..
This person should try living in -24C without heat and see if it changes their views.
As it is, I live in a climate that does dip below 0C from time to time, and having access to heat is important, so I have a backup generator for the house, and another for the well, because water is important too. When I use them, just the energy cost is much higher than utility power, so I don't use them when utility power is available. There's capital cost and operational costs to pay too. Many people who live around me don't have generators, so they have to hope outages won't be too long, or that they can make it to a warming center --- but outages are often coincident with locally heavy snowfall and our roads are always steep, so that makes it difficult to travel even short distances to get to warmth.
In my area, the issue isn't rolling blackouts, it's usually lines broken due to falling trees. Paying more for uninterupted utilities wouldn't fix that, but if it were rolling blackouts, I would certainly prefer to pay more for utility power for essential loads rather than paying more for local generation for essential loads.
In a similar sense that I'm not willing to pay more for "essential" food than for luxury food; or in the same sense that it seems unfair to have to pay for life-saving medical treatments.
It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand — the whole meaning of the word "inelastic" being that changing the price of it won't incentivize people to use any more/less of it.
Inelastic demand should, at the very least, be subsidized. This is why public healthcare exists; why food stamps exist; etc. But better yet, inelastic demand — because it is so predictable — should be optimized heavily for by suppliers (for power plants, this is "building out base-load capacity") such that economies of scale enable the supply for inelastic demand to be satisfied with lower cost than the supply for elastic demand.