Disclaimer, I've only skimmed through the first and not read the second. I'm not personally super-convinced as I think markets are in many ways a pretty good decentralized economical information sharing mechanism (in the sense of prices conveying information about scarcity etc.). That being said, there are of course numerous examples of market failure where some kind of state intervention is needed. And in some cases the market failures in question might be so severe and so hard and expensive to work around that a socialist model might in fact work better. Like health care or much of public infrastructure. But that doesn't IMHO mean that market mechanisms must be entirely abolished everywhere.
To get back on the topic of electrical grids, yes I think a mechanism of dispatching based on marginal costs is a good idea, as that means the lowest cost producers to meet the required demand are used. But also note that this is a pretty "synthetic" market, with a central planner deciding on which generators are dispatched, and customers are buying from that market rather than some kind of "natural" market where they'd go directly to the producers. And of course few end customers have their rates tied to the spot price, which sort of destroys the idea of demand response where the end users would react to high prices.
And the variability of the electricity price is only going to get more dramatic as more zero-marginal cost variable producers like wind, solar come online. In a simplified model with zero marginal cost producers and inelastic demand you'd either have a cost of zero when production is higher than demand and the administratively decided ceiling price (or infinity if such a ceiling hasn't been set) when demand is higher than production. Which doesn't really sound like a functioning market. So maybe we'll over time go towards a model where some kind of capacity market is responsible for the majority of generator income (and customer cost) and the wholesale spot market reduces in importance, mostly deciding the merit order for dispatching generators.
Cockshott, Cottrell: Towards a New Socialism, brief synopsis as well as a link to the PDF version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism
Phillips, Rozworski: People's Republic of Walmart, https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-...
Disclaimer, I've only skimmed through the first and not read the second. I'm not personally super-convinced as I think markets are in many ways a pretty good decentralized economical information sharing mechanism (in the sense of prices conveying information about scarcity etc.). That being said, there are of course numerous examples of market failure where some kind of state intervention is needed. And in some cases the market failures in question might be so severe and so hard and expensive to work around that a socialist model might in fact work better. Like health care or much of public infrastructure. But that doesn't IMHO mean that market mechanisms must be entirely abolished everywhere.
To get back on the topic of electrical grids, yes I think a mechanism of dispatching based on marginal costs is a good idea, as that means the lowest cost producers to meet the required demand are used. But also note that this is a pretty "synthetic" market, with a central planner deciding on which generators are dispatched, and customers are buying from that market rather than some kind of "natural" market where they'd go directly to the producers. And of course few end customers have their rates tied to the spot price, which sort of destroys the idea of demand response where the end users would react to high prices.
And the variability of the electricity price is only going to get more dramatic as more zero-marginal cost variable producers like wind, solar come online. In a simplified model with zero marginal cost producers and inelastic demand you'd either have a cost of zero when production is higher than demand and the administratively decided ceiling price (or infinity if such a ceiling hasn't been set) when demand is higher than production. Which doesn't really sound like a functioning market. So maybe we'll over time go towards a model where some kind of capacity market is responsible for the majority of generator income (and customer cost) and the wholesale spot market reduces in importance, mostly deciding the merit order for dispatching generators.