Most people accept the notion that access to things like electricity, road capacity, heating gas and similar commodities are different than other commodities.

It's ridiculous that it is acceptable for the owners of critical infrastructure to stand back and allow easily foreseeable market disruptions to take place. In businesses where meaningful competition exists, doing so puts you out of business. Peak energy demand is very easy to project with great accuracy, there is no excuse for a saturated/failed electrical grid.

Government isn't here to promote capitalism -- it's broad charter is to promote the general welfare if its citizens. Unstable market prices for electricity is a market and governance failure, period.

The quality of the decision made by either party does not invalidate that capitalism is a collection of voluntary activity. It's when government is involved that there is restriction on that activity, which frequently has unintended effects. If there is inadequate planning for future demand then prices may certainly vary more than is considered acceptable. Poor planning on a utility's part is not the fault of capitalism, but which seems to be the major point of the article and the original poster. Indeed, selling future contracts is generally viewed as a good way to stabilize future prices as it gives a signal as to general (market) consensus - if insurance for some activity is considered expensive then it should tell even the minimal of planners that an activity has unevaluated risk. An inability to act properly on such signals does indeed indicate poor planning on one party's part.

That's a very sophisticated way of saying that utility companies have some magical entitlement to say "Fuck you, pay me".

There's another answer that that a 5 year old could come up with, and happened to work very effectively for 75+ years: when the electrical grid is out of electrical transmission capacity, add more capacity.

Writing future contracts doesn't accomplish much, other than create jobs trading electricity, because the supply problem isn't generation, it's distribution. There is no market for electrical infrastructure.

I actually agree with disjointrevelry on this one.

> For every voluntary buyer in capitalism there is a voluntary seller.

Choice does not imply consent [1]. The word "voluntary" is ambiguous as to which concept it refers to and you can march a $70T element through the resulting loophole.

Capitalism is the philosophy of ditching compensatory justice in order to preserve marginal incentives (esp. with regard to supply and demand). Socialism is the philosophy of prioritizing compensatory justice over marginal incentives ("to each according to his contribution"). Like most people here, I side with the capitalist prioritization order, at least in markets that don't have a long record of market failure. In other words, I believe that it is more important for people to have incentives to fix supply/demand imbalances (e.g. for working power lines!) than it is for people to be rewarded for honest effort and punished for culpability (i.e. what I consider justice).

I think the article at hand is a perfect example of how markets sacrifice justice for correct incentives. What were the effects of the congestion contract?

1. It punished the power company for being incorrect regarding necessary maintenance. It also indirectly punished consumers. Did the consumers deserve to be punished for their power company's poor choices? No, of course not. Yet that's what this market transaction did. So it failed on the "justice" dimension.

2. It increased the financial stakes for the power company to meet its own estimations regarding online capacity. So it succeeded on the "incentives" dimension.

Justice was sacrificed in order to obtain correct incentives. Exactly as advertised.

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[1] Suppose a serial killer kidnaps you tomorrow and gives you the choice of death by machete or death by shotgun (if you try get smart about it, he chooses the machete for you). At his trial, should the fact that you chose "shotgun" be seen as proof that you consented to getting shot? Of course not.