Strictly speaking the price of oil does determine the price of electricity and the state utilities commissions are there to make sure that the company's remain profitable and pay their 8 to 10% dividend yearly. When the price of natural gas goes up the electrical companies have to make it up in higher rates to the consumers. The futures markets as you say work by regulating future supply and demand and offloading some potential risks for a large users such as airplane companies who can buy futures for the next one or two years for their jet fuel as it is a major component of their operating costs it's the same thing as corn futures and pig bellies if you ever watched the movie trading places you understand .
More to the point the seasonal weather has a lot to do also with gasoline prices and weather refinery switch over to making heating oil for the Northeast homes that need it to warm their housing.
Another big factor that nobody mentions is that we have a problem about 100 large refineries in the US and if one or more of these go down for maintenance there is a bump and spike in the price of gasoline. This is a huge national concern that nobody talks about is these refineries cost about a billion dollars to build and the concern is that there is a very tight relationship between gasoline refined and are supply and demand in the US through these refineries actually very closely match up to our needs so that if two or three of these are out of commission prices will definitely Spike
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