Risk aversion

You might be right about risk and wider society, but the big scam perpetrated by electricity suppliers is the way that mainstream "products" are promoted as giving you power at "cost price", giving the impression that the customer is being "empowered" since they get as favourable a rate as a company with direct access to the market, but this actually means that the customer is having to pay whatever the wildly fluctuating market price is, thus exposing them to risk instead of shielding them from it.

I guess you can negotiate a long-term power rate just as you can fix interest rates on savings or loans for a limited period, but you can imagine what the effect of the more typical customer-provider relationship is on the willingness of providers to act in a sustainable or responsible fashion. Indeed, they just pass on the risk as long as they can sufficiently cushion any sharp rise with their own liquidity and remain in business - something that at least one provider with which I had some experience didn't manage to do.

Meanwhile, who is actually doing the work producing the commodity being priced and investing in capacity? Maybe as commodities become more scarce and the obsession with speculation appears more obviously misguided, people may actually be reminded that other industries exist where the conditions for actual work being done (or output, or whatever you want to call it) have to be carefully maintained and should not occupy a lower position in society's priorities than those peripheral industries whose only role is to assume that the output will keep coming in full measure and to indulge in damaging speculation at everybody else's expense.