Reasonable, fair, equitable, sensible, not greedy, stable, are all fine sounding approaches to pricing for everything.
Nature is not fair or any of those things. Nature is just the four forces of the apocalypse in action, up close and personal, relentless and merciless.
Price is just a human mechanism to determine who gets what at any particular time. Price is not a matter of fair or any of those other fine ideas. Price is just an neutral arbiter of value like a metre, kilogram, second, lumen, joule etc are units of measure of those values.
It's not equitable if you are the person who dies because of the black-out or incurs some huge cost <There was recently an article describing that wholesale energy prices in Texas varied by fiftyfold during the recent emergency. In a sense, rolling blackouts, while a hardship, are more equitable imo. > No doubt you are cruel, heartless and don't care about other people, so when they die, you would write them off glibly with "Well, it's bad luck but these things happen. My condolences to the bereaved relatives and friends. In our next 5 year plan, we'll try to do better."
Or, maybe you aren't cruel, heartless and do care - so how would you ensure that that unique person who suddenly finds themselves in desperate need of electricity, even at 100 times the normal price would be able to maintain their life?
Price is the equitable way to do it because everyone would be able to buy the electricity they need if they really really want it and have had the sense to learn, work and save some money for a rainy day, or high-priced electricity night.
Price variation is also vastly more efficient than simply shutting down both high value and low value uses for electricity, blindly and pointlessly.
Normal variations in price would soon be commonly known: <
Doesn't this place a burden on the small consumer to be aware of coming short-term utility price trends? > People would soon learn when it's cheapest to top up their batteries, heat the floor slab, heat the hot water. They would get to know that peak winter demand prices will be high and that investing in some insulated clothing would be a good idea for times like that.
Of course they couldn't predict when some power station would get a Stuxnet virus or be wiped out by a volcanic eruption. They would just have to respond to whatever price that resulted. That's the nature of nature, red in tooth and claw. Life is not always predictable. Sometimes 100 times the price might be the way it goes.
Mqurice |
