That being said, it’s not like most people have a real-time monitor of electricity prices so those that can will actually reduce consumption.
It's worse than that, this was an extreme weather condition (temps as low as -2F/-19C) in a state where 60% of homes are heated by electricity and many of those use inefficient electrical resistance heating.
So even if residential users had real-time access to prices, they'd have to choose between paying any price or freezing. So it's not clear how elastic demand could be.
In the sense that a good heat pump can be over 400% efficient but electrical resistance heat is 100% efficient.
(ok, it's not scientifically correct to say that anything is over 100% efficient, and COP gets lower as the temperature decreases, but a good minisplit can still deliver a COP close to 2.0 down to 0 degrees F)
Arguably heat pumps would've made this worse, because although they decrease total power usage they increase the rate at which power usage goes up during cold spells, making the ratio of normal power usage to peak worst-case power usage even larger and harder for the grid to deal with. In systems that are well sized for the climate, this often means outright falling back to inefficient resisitive heating with all the resulting electricity demand from that.
It's worse than that, this was an extreme weather condition (temps as low as -2F/-19C) in a state where 60% of homes are heated by electricity and many of those use inefficient electrical resistance heating.
So even if residential users had real-time access to prices, they'd have to choose between paying any price or freezing. So it's not clear how elastic demand could be.