Weirdly enough, cities that had their own power companies could have such contracts and didn't get rolling blackouts. I worked in Santa Clara at the time and lived in Sunnyvale. We never lost power at work but frequently found all the clocks flashing when I got home.
Which sort of suggests that centralization is the problem, not public versus private. We had a private company failing and public power companies unperturbed.
You seem to be looking to blame centralization to fit a preconceived normative view of economics rather than just acknowledging maybe markets were not effective or efficient in this particular instance and in fact suffered a massive distortion specifically because a decentralized profit motive allowed one party to abuse market making mechanisms and hijack the price setting function so crucial to efficiency.
And if we did, we would probably change it the day after it failed.
Centralization enables a lot of good thing but also some bad things. Lobbying thrives on centralization because it is easier for decision makers to scam people they don't know, more likely to happen with centralization.
the market itself was a massively cool idea, it's just that Enron had a massive conflict of interest and played both sides. they should have stuck to being a market maker and spun off their trading arm.
The CA blackouts predates the Enron fraud and accounting scandal by at least 6 months. At no time during the blackouts was anyone aware of Enrons fraud.
SOX was regulation to prevent that fraud. Notice, it does and says absolutely nothing about the energy market. That's because SOX was not designed to address the cause of the CA blackouts.
