> The bigger task is to redesign power markets to reflect the new need for flexible supply and demand. They should adjust prices more frequently, to reflect the fluctuations of the weather. At times of extreme scarcity, a high fixed price could kick in to prevent blackouts. Markets should reward those willing to use less electricity to balance the grid, just as they reward those who generate more of it. Bills could be structured to be higher or lower depending how strongly a customer wanted guaranteed power all the time—a bit like an insurance policy.
Most electricity in the US is distributed across wholesale electricity markets with nodal pricing, which have all of these mechanisms where distributors/utilities are the customers. The author appears to suggest moving pricing out to end users, which is possible even just on the utilities side, without having to restructure power markets. Restructuring power markets to take into account individual end user behaviour rather than aggregate demand would be a gargantuan effort--right now the California Independent System Operator's (CAISO) optimization process takes into account a few thousand nodal prices, and there are tens of millions of households in California. Having utilities introduce demand response and smart metering to approximate their costs would be a much simpler implementation.
It is possible (after clearing many hurdles) to participate in the electricity markets in order to identify inefficiencies around renewables and incentivize their use by providing better price signals to planning markets, but this is very challenging and most utilities and power trading groups/companies are not interested in that angle. It is, however, one of the things we're doing at Invenia ( https://invenia.ca/).