Tribune. The repeated increases in the price of electricity have created a sort of mystery around the “European energy market”. Why does a market open to competition not generate moderate prices? Faced with the increase in the bill, we are discovering complex and counter-intuitive logic. Because electricity is not a standard good, despite its omnipresence in our daily lives.
In 1996, Directive 92 / EC began the long road to opening up the electricity sector to competition, the objective of which is to “Guarantee a functioning market offering fair access and a high level of consumer protection, as well as appropriate levels of interconnection and generation capacity”. Consumers must be able to freely choose their electricity supplier, and suppliers must be able to benefit from free access to electricity transmission and distribution networks. The activities of production and supply of electricity must thus pass in the competitive field, by abandoning the national monopolies. The activities of transport (long distance) and distribution (local network) of electricity remain regulated. A parallel objective of this reform is to ensure security of supply, that is to say to guarantee that all European consumers benefit from a supply of electricity without blackouts. But the texts never mention a price reduction target …
The path to competition is gradual, accompanied by various directives and regulations. And it is strewn with pitfalls: we have to organize a market for a good that cannot be stored, that we need in real time, that must cross borders while the electricity networks were historically built according to a national logic. These choices favored very capital-intensive but different technologies: nuclear in France, coal in Germany, gas in Spain and Italy, hydroelectric in Sweden for example.
Complex architecture
In this obstacle course, the 2000s added the need for decarbonization, by gradually declining more and more ambitious objectives of integrating renewable energies into electricity production, and by imposing an additional cost on their producers. emissions, as part of the European carbon permit market.
The architecture of electricity markets is complex because it thus interweaves different objectives (free choice of consumers, competition, security of supply, decarbonisation). And the price of electricity is supposed to be the cornerstone of this architecture.
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