If the industrials have hedged, they don't suffer any short term pain.  Now you have to stimulate them to buy out of their sales contracts to free up the gas.  That sounds straightforward but people are lazy and would prefer not to upset well laid plans.

Energy markets have been running around for a decade selling these folks price hedges...

• they don't apply to large volumes, so the absolute amounts of money involved are not so big even if the headlines are spectacular;

• they are required in a market setting to make peakers - i.e. power plants that function only when there is a lot of demand - profitable. As they produce a lot fewer kWh than base load plants, they need higher prices per unit to make it worthwhile. It's a pretty risky business, but it is possible to build a business plan on it.

• "liberalisers" that do not have the courage to apply their ideology to the end, and liberalise the wholesale market while keeping caps on retail prices (final users are thus artificially protected form higher prices - one wonders why if the goal is efficiency and good allocation of resources; surely high prices would be a signale to end users to consume less, right). That's what happened in California, and the utilities got squeezed between higher wholesale prices and fixed retail prices, and lost tons of money;

• market transparency and liquidity becomes essential, and anti-competitive behavior by traders or others must be fought. But that's pretty hard to do against determined cheaters;

• as a side note to the above, the requirement to have enough spare capacity, a vital need of the system, should be imposed on all players. The UK electricity market is much better in that respect in that it imposes fair balancing and spinning reserves costs to all, thus making it an even playing field and a well regulated system. Traders are penalised in such a system, but that's how it should be because otherwise they'll just free-ride on the spare capacity provided by others.

• on a long term view, the way new entrants are allowed in is an essential part of the regulatory framework (can they get permits easily, is there a NIMBY syndrome that protects existing players, are they allwoed to sign long term supply and sale contracts to secure financings...