Think about gasoline consumption in an economy. If gas is $1/gal in today's dollars you can make many trips, they're almost free. At $3/gal people do some prudent economizing. At $10/gal people stop driving and take the bus, carpool, etc.

Making the price go up 10x won't cut consumption by 90% though, maybe only 50%. Trades still need to get to the job, food still has to get delivered to stores and some people who make huge salaries will still drive to work.

During the pandemic fuel demand didn't go down by 50% and yet the price dropped dramatically. Sure office workers stayed home but that's not 80% of the jobs. Think about how much the gas price dropped vs how much traffic was still on the streets. It almost certainly wasn't a linear relationship.

Not fully sure this is that, but it reminds me of something an American friend explained about their business under the Trump regime (as a rant about how laypeople were deeply under-reacting to the tourism decline):

If it takes 100 tourists to pay his bills, taxes, staffing, and other expenses for the day, the next 5 tourists represent the profit. A tourism decline of 10% doesn’t mean 10% less profit, it means the catastrophic inviability of the whole business as it’s currently structured.

its simple demand and supply if you have 100 buyers for 99 the price will shoot up but if you have 100 seller and 99 buyers sellers will drop price so. Previously gas turbines were charging through the nose when sudden demand spikes but now batteries are competing with them and pricing them out

Mankiw’s Principles of Economics. The concept being illustrated here is elasticity.

There is a (IMHO) good explanation at https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/what-does-merit-or...

Keyterms: "marginal cost", "merit order", "market-clearing price".

This sounds like Price elasticity of demand which is a measure of how sensitive the quantity demanded is to its price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand