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rgmerktoday at 12:37 AM0 repliesview on HN

Pretty sure the answer is no, most of the time.

As I understand it (and even if I’m broadly right I’m greatly simplifying) there’s an auction system and if demand is X kilowatts, they line up all the bids to supply in cost order and draw a line at X kilowatts. All successful bidders receive the price bid by the highest successful bidder.

There are rare times in this kind of market where the price does go very high (though not to $1000 per kwh), and those brief periods push average prices up substantially.

In markets where batteries are going gangbusters, they are squashing many of these peaks and thus reducing average prices paid by consumers (though not as much as you’d hope because the majority of retail electricity costs are distribution rather than generation).