Griddy has an app that shows the price, and they were sending out email alerts at least, maybe more -- I am not a customer of theirs. The price system could ha

Griddy has an app that shows the price, and they were sending out email alerts at least, maybe more -- I am not a customer of theirs. The price system could have actually led to a better outcome here. If all the electric customers in Texas knew about the huge price spike, and actionable information like "You have electric heat, so if you heat normally, it will cost you $3000/day", many would have turned down their thermostats to the absolute minimum tolerable level, some would have fired up generators, and some would have shut things down and stayed with someone else. If everyone had been faced with that choice, there probably would not have been a need for the blackouts at all, and the price would have come down to a high, but less outrageous level. As it was, the supply was constrained, and the demand was essentially inelastic, because people didn't have any real incentive to radically conserve, since they weren't paying the wholesale rates. Now that said, I'm not sure this is really a good idea after all. There are so many things that I'm supposed to be optimizing these days, I just don't have the bandwidth to think about all of them. I really am not interested in planning when I do the laundry or set the thermostat based on what is happening with the electrical grid. I'd much rather just pay somewhat of a premium for the grid to be overprovisioned like it used to be and not have to worry about any of this crap.