They had almost uncapped max wholesale prices for energy during the blackouts. At some point it had reached 10k per megawatthour! Of course companies went bankrupt, and of course BP traders held bonus parties. The taxpayers apart from these they also had to bail out the bankrupt retailers.
The sky high energy price and the collapse of gas supply were the fundamental price drivers. The alternative scenario is that the gas market players were just price gouging. Pick what you want.
This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.
The cap was raised to $9k to try and incentivize generation because the forward reserve margin was dwindling. ERCOT was the only electric market in the US that was actually growing and old thermal plants were retiring because they couldn’t economically compete with new renewables. Bill Hogan @ Harvard was commissioned to help solve this problem and his team created a new scarcity pricing mechanism along with higher price caps based on the value of lost load. These caps were set by the PUCT and ERCOT had no say in them.
Why are you so focused on caps and not on learning the difference between gas and power markets? You keep trying to simplify very complex systems and issues with a half baked understanding of some basic talking points and minimal understanding of how the markets actually operate.
ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.
However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/04/ercot-texas-electric...
I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.
Gas and power are intertwined but still very separate markets.
Natural gas would have gone even higher had ERCOT not shed load, so if you want to make reductionist statements about complex issues, you could say that ERCOT actually took away from the bonuses of BP gas traders who were long.