> And unlike when Greece collapse happened, the voices in Berlin are suspiciously quiet about austerity.

You seem to have no idea whatsoever, what is currently going on in Germany, because literally the opposite is true. Germany is trying to practice austerity and keeping its so called "debt brake" (German states have to have a balanced budget, federal state can take up to 0,35% of GDP in new loans) by cutting subsidies, which is why farmers have been protesting in Berlin etc.

I have a layman understanding of the pricing structure so it's probably not entirely true "paying the highest spot price in the EU" directly but given I was paying 5-10x more for electricity in December 2022 than ever before my best guess is that when Germany was paying a lot more for electricity due to an increase in the price of gas-generated electricity we were affected by the dominoes falling: electricity would be sold for a higher bid if exported to Germany (or to a zone neighbouring Germany which would be selling to Germany) which caused a shortfall in my zone (SE3) increasing the bid price.

So even if it was a second order effect I had to pay much more than ever before due to increased spot prices in other zones.

How do you figure that?

Sweden exported electricity almost every hour for 2023 (import 40 hours of 8760 = 0.5%). Most of the hours when importing electricity was due to low and negative prices when operators could use water reservoirs as batteries. Currently, there is an obvious overcapacity with an export of almost 20% of production.

I'm counting nuclear in the 90+% of electricity (not energy in general where oil will count), not renewable though I agree, more like non-CO2 emitting.