I agree that the article is unclear. Perhaps this is a dubious analogy, but this sounds sort of like Twitter making a bet that their site won't go down in order to fund improvements to the system so that the site won't go down. This would seem to increase the consequences of failure, which is the opposite of what a reasonable engineer should do.

So I understand why financial firms might want to buy these contracts. I don't understand why anyone is selling them. It seems like a big distraction from the energy company's actual business. Don't they have enough incentive to keep the system running already? Shouldn't they be building their own monitoring and models to predict energy supply and demand? It seems like that would provide more useful information than a market, which is noisy and opaque even when it's working properly.