This market has been open since 1998 and is basically high frequency trading in energy demand. I was first introduced to it in ~2010 when a friend was comissioned by a millionaire hospital glue tycoon to write a machine learning algorithm to execute high frequency trades on it.
This is absolute fucking lunacy. The millionaire wasn't even in the Midwest, he just wanted to profit off some insider knowledge he had about sketchy electrical grids. Fuck America.
We literally sold the copper wiring of this country to wall street ghouls.
Here's the one that is currently killing Texans
Here's their site that's currently charging thousands of dollars per MWH
The market alerts archive page reads like an Ayn Rand wet dream
For funsies: current market cap is $9000/Mwh. The average American home uses about 1Mwh/month (sometimes a bit less). So that means if people were paying "market price" for their energy, it would cost them roughly $200/day to stay warm.
This is literally built on the enron model. They allow futures trading. Plenty of people only have a few solar panels and if they bust out would never be able to supply the energy they promised they could. This system will result in rolling blackouts across the country as shit starts to get bad.
It's my understanding that Enron also intentionally shut off the power when everything was fine and lied about problems with the grid.
That's currently happening in Texas. Because it's a private grid, the energy companies are refusing to generate power unless the $9000 market cap is lifted and they're allowed to charge their customers market price.
I have a feeling people are going to start calling for that. Texas chuds are already calling for the people to have a say instead of the socialist private power companies lol.
I remember Varoufakis spitballing an idea to crash one of these speculators through coordinated withholding of payments.
Pretty sure it was in this talk but I don't remember what timestamp. Might have been in the Q&A.
https://youtu.be/gGeevtdp1WQ
I remember having no fucking clue what he was talking about at the time.