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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

It's simply not realistic to expect consumers or most small businesses to participate in futures markets. And futures markets sometimes break down with the counterparty failing to deliver. That's not a problem with most commodities but electricity shortages cause real problems.

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I expect the only viable solution left is to go around the meter using an aggregator like Tesla Autobidder. A large entity consolidates many home batteries as one "virtual" battery, handles the grid futures prediction and dispatching for a cut, and re-distributes a majority of revenue back to the battery owners.

This effectively uses the existing behind-the-meter grid market to make an end-run around current perverse (non-local, non-instantaneous) end-customer pricing schemes.

A downside to these schemes is that the stability of the electric system now also depends on large communication networks and some computer solving some algorithm. I can imagine the outages. I prefer my power outages to be caused by good old fashioned weather rather than Hadoop kubernetes cluster operator eventually consistent race error.

Yes I agree. Ideally there's an ecosystem with many providers, minimizing the impact of any one system failure.

More likely, the NSA / Homeland Security will assist large providers in system hardening and resilience.

They already do - here in the U.K. you can fix your energy price for 12-24 months typically which is a gamble in the future price of energy.

Though in that case the exact prediction made did come true. Massive gas price increases due to the Ukraine war bankrupted a bunch of businesses selling fixed price energy that they could no longer supply without making unsustainable losses.

Various government interventions followed but they were so bad you might assume that they were more interested in ensuring their mates in the gas industry made high profits than protecting the nation from the fallout.

I suspect the real failure mode was around the price cap. Utilities should have been hedging against wholesale prices raising above the cap for a sustained period of time as occured. Net-net the result is the same and the cents in the dollar saved when prices were normal / stable were long gone when prices went much higher. (Note in the UK at least we have been in payback for a long time now with customer pricing at the cap and wholesale typically much much lower)

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