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They can turn off some generators and adjust the supply down for ideal revenue/profits, reduce staffing levels, and extend equipment life. There's no reason for them to charge you $50 for something once you've told them you'll pay $100 for it.
You should listen to some of the recordings of the energy traders at Enron. They did this stuff all the time.
Still nothing terribly new here. Energy has always had inelastic demand, meaning usage doesn't change much with price. Whether gas costs 1, 3, or 5 dollars people still need to get to work and will still buy stuff. Maybe people will start to combine trips or whatever with higher prices, but nothing huge.
Exactly, so there's never a reason to bring down the price. If anything you'd bring down the supply (e.g. Enron during the California energy crisis).
I mean... Gas prices are relatively low right now, at least here in 'Merica. I've seen them more than double what they are now, how did that happen?
Gas isn't energy, it's fuel. It's a commodity with a global market. Producers have to physically store it. Refined gasoline has a shelf life and production is planned weeks to months in advance. If demand falls off their product depreciates and they have storage expenses. If a gas company cuts production below demand competitors can ramp up and eat that market share because consumers have options.
But electricity tends to be a captured, monopolistic market. There's no scalable physical storage. The supply is whatever they are producing locally right now and they have some say in that. There's no tanker of Saudi electricity coming to relieve the market and you're not going to drive your house to a filling station to top off your electricity.
Liquid natural gas is similar, in that most people will just pay whatever is asked for what's pumped into their homes, but less dramatic because it is a physical commodity that can be replaced or substituted.
It absolutely is. Do I need to explain why that's a ridiculous take, or have you had enough coffee by now to realize it?
It absolutely is not. It is a commodity fuel that can be converted into heat energy when vaporized and ignited by a secondary energy source. You can pour it directly into a combustion engine and nothing will happen until you provide a spark. It can evaporate without being converted into a significant source of energy.
Electricity is energy. It does not need a secondary source of energy to convert it into heat or light. Electricity arcs through the atmosphere it instantly and automatically converts to light and heat.
That's why they are produced, transported, and sold in such radically different ways.
Energy is not created or destroyed, it only gets transformed from one form to another. Fuel represents a storage of energy. So when you burn fuel, you are taking the energy contained in that fuel and using it to create heat energy, harness it to make a car move, generate electricity (which you seem to agree is energy as well), or whatever.
Think about high school physics. Bring a 200 pound weight to the top of a tower, and it has potential energy. Nothing happens, just as nothing happens to fuel without a spark, but if you drop it out turns into kinetic energy. Let it hit the ground, and the sidewalk will absorb some of that energy as it breaks, it gets absorbed into sound energy, the whole process repeats on a smaller scale as it bounces, etc. All energy, and not in the hippy "the universe is all energy, maaan" kind of way.
The first part of this Technology Connections video also shows how propane is stored energy that gets converted: https://youtu.be/OOK5xkFijPc - just because that spark was needed to convert the energy in that propane to heat, doesn't mean the spark is the source of the energy. If you're going to be pedantic enough that I have to explain that.