Choosing Europe’s Energy Dependencies
Energy independence is out of reach, so Europe has to choose which dependencies it keeps and how deep it lets them run.
Every plant that runs is paid the price of the last megawatt-hour needed. Values are illustrative, not market data.
In 2022 a German baker saw his energy bill quadruple in a year. Like millions of households and businesses across Europe, he was paying for a dependency on Russian gas that he had no influence over. State support got him through the crisis. The next one could hit him just as hard.
Europe’s answer was emergency support across the board: €651 billion in 17 months. It reached the villa with the heated pool as readily as the pensioner in a small, cold flat, and did very little to soften the next crisis.
Ursula von der Leyen concluded that the electricity market was not fit for purpose, because prices were high. The book argues that the prices were telling us about scarcity and dependency. Rather than blaming the market, Europe should have blamed the dependencies behind the price spikes and worked to reduce them. Case studies make it concrete: Spain arguing it was an energy island, a Norwegian party leaving government over two cables to the continent, Britain paying wind farms to switch off while importing power.
One auction, one clearing price, paid to every plant that runs. Gas sets it far more often than its share of the mix.
The price measures scarcity. Protecting people from it is a separate policy decision about who carries the cost.
High prices are a leaking roof. You can grab a bucket that moves the cost to someone else, buy insurance that limits the damage, or fix the roof so the water stops.
per MWh. France's day-ahead price for one hour on 3 April 2022.
Chapter 1allocated by European governments to shield consumers from the energy crisis. Most of it paid for buckets.
Bruegel, June 2023 · Chapter 6chapters in five parts, with 42 figures and maps, several built on Montel EnAppSys market data.
About 72,000 wordsEurope swapped Russian pipeline gas for Norwegian pipelines and American LNG. Renewables and nuclear replace some of that gas, and bring a new dependency on Chinese panels and batteries. The book sets the two side by side, a fuel rented by the hour against equipment bought with the house, and gives Europe guidelines for choosing which dependencies it would rather carry.
The engineering answer is often the sensible one. The politician who pushes it seldom gets re-elected. The last chapters look at what drives the attention span of policymakers, and how sensible solutions can still get priority.
The curious reader who buys Ed Conway, Hannah Ritchie or Helen Thompson, followed the energy crisis on the news, and still can't explain why the bill goes up when the wind is blowing. Part I is written for them.
People who work in energy, from traders and developers to grid staff, consultants and energy journalists, will read the case studies and Part V closely, partly to argue with them. For policymakers and their staff in Brussels and national capitals, chapters 3, 6, 16, 19 and 20 matter most. University courses in energy economics and European policy can use it as supplementary reading.
Electricity and gas prices have hardly left the front pages since 2020. In the first three months of 2026 alone, the Financial Times covered price swings driven by the Iran war and Italy's fight with Brussels over carbon costs, and Handelsblatt asked why solar parks are switched off more and more often. Each time they quoted the author. EU market reform will stay in the headlines for years.
| Date | Outlet | Piece |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-03-07 | Financial Times | Power prices in Europe swing wildly as Iran war stokes volatility |
| 2026-03-01 | Financial Times | Italy sets up fight with Brussels over carbon costs |
| 2026-02-04 | Handelsblatt | Energie: Warum Solaranlagen immer häufiger abgeschaltet werden |
| 2025-10-18 | E24 | Fare for nye sjokk: Kan se strømpriser på fjorårets nivå |
| 2025-02-27 | Financial Times | Green energy gets switched off as power systems fail to keep up |
| 2024-03-02 | El País | El sol consolida a España como gran exportador de electricidad |
| 2022-12-06 | Financial Times | 'Don't take the lift': French alarm rises over risk of winter power cuts |
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