This results in partially absurd rewards for powering off your mini-plant to stabilize the network. Being paid not to output electricity or, similarly, being p

This results in partially absurd rewards for powering off your mini-plant to stabilize the network. Being paid not to output electricity or, similarly, being paid to consume electricity -- which is also a thing -- is absurd only at first glance. But really, it's just transparent pricing. And it incentivizes people to come up with ways to exploit it, either by storing power when it's cheap and releasing it when it's expensive, or by only consuming it when it's cheap. I think it's pretty neat. It's not a new thing, either: power has always been cheaper at off-peak (during the night), because big power plants such as nuclear plants can't (or couldn't, or wouldn't) scale up and down based on time of day. This was exploited by making things such as a night storage heater, which truly is absurd, because it's both impractical (slow to react to human capriciousness) and inefficient (energy losses during initial electricity generation and power transfer).