This was certainly created with good intentions, but the result today is that even in countries with nuclear-dominated electricity (such as france), electricity prices will soar tremendously.
Imagine every bit of food you ate cost the same as the most expensive. The caviar goes up, and suddenly no one can afford to eat.
Why don't we use less caviar and/or also suspend the stupid rule about food price?
Owners of food businesses getting paid caviar prices for delivering scotch eggs. No, let's wait till some people die, because I'm getting rich.
Right wing governments really don't like that idea. See their reaction to COVID, they really heavily depend on the idea that the people with all the money 'earned it'.
Much easier to blame renewables.
It's always the renewables isnt it. They kill birds and give you ear cancer and don't even really work. Not like those superb fossil fuels that have no drawbacks at all.
Who wants to listen to experts when you can just create a crisis by ignoring them and then blame it on the experts you didn't listen to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order
> The historic methodology for economic dispatch was developed to manage fossil fuel burning power plants, relying on calculations involving the input/output characteristics of power stations.
Which seems relevant when people are talking about society collapsing and people freezing to death. And some people have strong financial incentives to not fix it.
I think you need to read your economics text books again. Yes marginal costs can impact the marginal supply of electricity, but the price is set by basic supply and demand. In a shortage if there isn't any gas, gas powered stations are off, if isn't enough electricity to go around the prices goes up until people stop buying it.
FWIU, once the gaz station are active ( because of a surge in demand) the price is set to theirs for the whole electricity produced, not just the one they produce.
This threshold effect is very peculiar and is very different from other markets (i assume oil extraction cost are lot different depending on where they take place, but for electricity in our current situation the cost difference are so wide that it sure makes the whole system look a bit absurd)
Right now there are new incremental suppliers waiting to deliver electricity so demand destruction is the only thing to stop the price going to infinity.
The decision to combine all kinds of electricity under a single market is arbitrary. it was of course made for convenience for the consumer, i suppose. I'm clearly not an expert, so i can't pinpoint exactly what makes the current situation weird. Maybe it's the fact that energy production is a strategical matter often determined at a country level, and so having all the benefit of the "best" strategy lost to the customer, simply because other countries didn't make the correct choice, seem a bit wrong.
Or maybe it's the fact that we chose to not make a distinction between local price and foreign price ? ie: have a local price for when the electricity produced is consumed in the same country ?