3 ms·

They obviously did both

• kerblang 5y ago
  I.E. They raised prices and "ensured" scarcity, yes.
• caf 5y ago
  That's exactly what the paper that the linked press release is about looks into. In an energy-only market, the intention is that the possibility of very high spot prices when energy supply is short is supposed to create an incentive to build expensive, robust plant that can meet the demand in such a situation. If you can stay online during the disaster, you can make a profit that makes up for having overspecced your plant for the remainder of the time. It can even make sense to have a quick-starting plant with a high short-run-marginal-cost that almost never runs at all - only starting up when supply is constrained or demand is very high, to take advantage of the high prices - a "peaker" plant. The paper is positing that this didn't work because the risks of investing in such a business plan were too high.