I don't think they can charge whatever they like. There are some regulations on the max price a generator charge for electricity, which we hit during the last freeze.
I heard about people paying over $10/kWH and having $15k bills for about 5 days of power. I know people who paid well over $1000 for the month and their power was out for much of the cold spell (~50%). I hear they're going to try and lower billing to less than $9000/MWh, but that's not going to encourage building proper infrastructure, and making gouging profitable doesn't encourage any of them to improve reliability. Why bother weatherproofing?
I'm reminded of Enron's "grandma Millie" comments.
