Like, oh, say, "regular consumer electric rates" that everyone ordinarily pays?

I assume you're being sarcastic, but if not, that "insurance product" is "use a fixed-rate pricing provider", like pretty much everyone in the state.

Broader: Literally every other residential customer in the United States other than Griddy customers in Texas. (There’s some variable rate but not like that)

I had a friend who worked there and we discussed potential solutions to this after the 2019 spike (I worked at a BNPL fintech and now at an insuretech). It was really a lot for a startup to do and no third parties would take on a program at that scale.

Technically this company was trying to fulfill the market need driven by the deregulation, and trying to provide lower cost solutions to the consumer, but they needed to build something to help with these spikes. They could have eventually I think, but just a tough business frankly!

> but they needed to build something to help with these spikes. They could have eventually I think, but just a tough business frankly!

You mean, like, they could charge a slightly higher price most of the time, so they can shelter their customers from rare wild price fluctuations?

> It was really a lot for a startup to do and no third parties would take on a program at that scale.

No one wanted to take the other side of a tail risk trade?

I wonder if they could have made tail risk bets that prices could spike during seasonal occurrences that had small fixed upfront costs, but high enough payout to absorb losses while still keeping prices lower than competitors. If they could have, none of us would be talking about this now (except maybe "How one energy company won big betting that energy prices would eventually spike").

There is, it's the style of electricity plan that the rest of the country is on

It would be called having a fixed cost contract

How would that differ from just paying retail price for electricity?

Well for starters you're adding a third party into the mix.

I guess that sounds sarcastic, because probably for most people it's not worth it, but there's probably a point where the added overhead of the third party is worth the savings. Maybe then the third party insurer would be motivated to build active cost monitoring device that will cut the power to your house when the price gets too high. Do you trust your power provider to build un-backdooered logic, that they won't use for other purposes, for such a thing?

It being a third party also affords other opportunities, like, not buying the insurance and building your own power/price monitoring kit/algorithm. Suppose you are willing to pay a high premium to keep your freezer running but not the wall warts on all of your voltage-transformed devices?