The negative price doesn't help you, or your utility which is your economic proxy. Your utility is (largely) not paying the negative price because the price is

The negative price doesn't help you, or your utility which is your economic proxy. Your utility is (largely) not paying the negative price because the price is negative when not much electricity is being used. Think about it, how much electricity is the average house using at 3am? Not much. So, the price being negative then doesn't save you any money. Now, if you set your dishwasher, electric dryer, etc to run at 3am then you wind up saving your utility some money. Some industrial customers have the ability to automatically ramp equipment up and down or schedule maintenance for when they know power prices will be high. CA having a large amount of intermittent renewable power sources means your grid has to spend more on storage or peaker plants, dirty gas plants that can ramp up and down quickly to match load. You pay for that in a higher bill.