France was getting along just fine with publicly-owned EDF, but then the EU came along and decided we needed to privatize. Except that we can't actually expose consumers to volatile market prices, so the result is a Frankenstein abomination that gets all the downsides of the private sector with none of the upsides. Kind of like US healthcare
> but then the EU came along and decided we needed to privatize
There'd be a lot less anti-EU sentiment if there was a bright line against meddling with what should be internal affairs of sovereign states, instead of growing like a cancer until everything is under its purview, and national governments are just for show.
Thinking that an electricity market that buys and sells massively across state borders and pretty much form a continuous grid is solely "internal affairs" is just pure simplistic naivety
Of course, in crunch situations like last year it did show major issues (which were not all due to the way the market works to be fair).
The entire price issue that all of Europe suffered was that the price of electricity is set to the marginal cost of the latest gas turbines running. Produce 99% of your energy with nuclear, at 40€/MWh ? Still pay everything at 499€/MWh because the market must not be disturbed.
> There'd be a lot less anti-EU sentiment if there was a bright line against meddling with what should be internal affairs of sovereign states
GDPR, DMA and DSA, the Covid recovery funds, Schengen, Erasmsus. Just those massive things off the top of my head compensate the EU's normalisation across Europe in certain markets, which has had it's successes (in the making) like separating rail operations from infrastructure thus allowing competition, and non successes like the common European energy market which has plenty of good ideas on paper, but when faced with a massive energy crisis due to extreme external factors is terrible.
I don't know about Sweden, but the way it was done in the UK is the poster child of how not to do it. It's the worst possible way, with privatize mini-monopolies for every portion.
What i mean is something like in the rest of the EU, where you have the rail infrastructure provider, and then anyone can come in and apply for a license to operate trains as long as they fill the requirements, pay for the access and there's physical space.
So now in France we have competition on some routes, and it's amazing. Frecciarosa trains blow SNCF TGVs out of the water, and the mere threat of the coming competition forced SNCF to add many more options with low cost high and low speed trains.
