First off: What is a price cap? It’s when someone thinks the market price for something is “obscenely high,” says the people shouldn’t be forced to pay that much, and gets the government to legislate the price at a “reasonable” level. In California, they capped prices on electricity for consumers to make sure that they would be “protected” against the supposedly wild price increases of the evil producers.
I’m sure people of both parties agreed to the caps, so that people would think, “Hey, they’re in our camp! They’re very concerned and they’re going to make sure that we don’t get raped with high prices for electricity.” They didn’t cap anything else – and even if they’d tried to, there are always market forces you can’t cap. But in this case where they only cap the price to the consumer, here’s what happened: