alt Hacker NewsIn other words it doesn’t work that way. The people who actually pay for the end product do not have the opportunity to apply market pressure by choosing a different source.
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mhb • last Friday at 7:16 PM
So you weren't really "just curious". You felt it necessary to cherry pick a particular commodity to debunk the notion that markets are markets? Do harder to steel man it.
Yes, they do apply market pressure. They can change who they buy from and there are different deals - like fixed rate, or different charges for different time periods.
The intermediate players "electricity retailers" then participate in a day ahead and real time market to fulfill their obligations to their customers. This is a good summary (https://chatgpt.com/share/696170d5-5d08-8002-a0ff-e2f45e42c4...) - if you hate ai links, so be it, this is a good description of an esoteric topic.
You'll find most markets actually work this way. When I go to the supermarket to buy sugar, the price isn't jumping around real time with the underlying price of sugar. Same for coffee etc. But it changes with a lag, and consumers respond and the effects flow through even if not in real time. Similar things occur in most markets where there is a wholesale market for something and then several players between that market and the consumer, each player doing some combination of logistics, risk eating, aggregation/disaggregation etc.