The blackout underscored the need to be prepared in case the grid goes down again. It is quite legal in most circumstances for any private party to buy their own generator. Most hospitals for instance keep their own private generators, almost never to be used, at a phenomenal cost for the electricity actually used, maybe I guess thousands of dollars per kilowatt hour. Similarly many better-off homeowners now buy their own generators, perhaps never to be used, so that calculating the cost per kilowatt hour entails dividing by zero.
What is missing, so far as I know, is trade in emergency power. Any entrepreneur who undertook systematically to sell electricity for what the market would bear during an outage would soon meet the regulators, I suppose, such that this business is just too risky to enter. For most parties the only practicable alternatives are to buy their own generators or to go without power.Of course some charity in electricity appears during an outage, with occasional extension cords running from people with generators to neighbors without.
But what is missing is an industry in emergency power. Imagine a fleet of generator trucks ready to go on shot notice to wherever there is an outage, each ready to connect to the power line into a neighborhood, ready to collect 50 times the usual rate for electric power from grateful customers who just want to keep their freezers running. A business like that could be viable and should in fact grow if markets were free in the industry.
Part of the problem of course is that, while generation in power plants has been somewhat deregulated, the distribution lines are still mostly owned and operated by government-monopoly franchises -- organizations which have no incentive to let you sell your electricity through their lines.
