Interesting! So even if the demand would justify paying $12000/MWh, ERCOT just permits brownouts or blackouts instead of paying that much? (I can't load the article you linked.)
Realistically a price higher than that wouldn't really have any effect on incentivizing generators any more, since there is a limit to how fast they can ramp up, how much spinning reserve capacity they have etc. So, it mostly just serves to protect the market from falling off the rails. The grid operation itself is actually largely disconnected from the market - the ISO primarily calls the shots with scheduling regardless of what the market is doing.
