The money has gone to pay power plants that can supply winter capacity, exactly as the market is designed to do.

The intention of the payments is to increase revenue for that kind of power generation capability to encourage more such plants be constructed.

The argument in the article is dubious to me. Of course the higher price isn’t leading to more generation today, that’s not the point, the point is to reward developers that build and built capacity CA needs in winter. The disagreement then becomes which model is correct about how much capacity is actually needed.. but the fact that a tiny move in demand moves the price so substantially seems to me to undermine the entire premise of the blog post, clearly supply is severely constrained?