As a Swede the third one is terrifying, unifying the energy market has been catastrophic for us, both price and environment wise.
The latest is added taxes due to choke points designed by EU from the first place..
Previously Sweden was much tighter coupled to German prices, but since fossil fuels were cheap people didn’t really notice.
Today due to CO2 cap and trade fossil emissions are expensive. [1]
Couple it with a massive renewable buildout leading to a decoupling of the prices that didn’t happened before.
We now have maximum volatility. Jumping between expensive fossil prices and an absolutely mindbogglingly large surplus leading to essentially free energy.
As Germany, and the rest of Europe, transitions to renewables we will spend less and less time on fossil fuel marginal prices and see our energy systems stabilize on renewable and storage prices. Outside of emergency reserve style situations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...
> Just look at the dispersion of prices across European electricity hubs.
Same Swedes were complaining (and still are!) about having to bail out the poorer members of the Union, should Sweden adopt the Euro and have a tighter integration with the Eurozone.
The common motivation of the EU is to smooth out these things across the countries, so we don't have these wild differences between countries. That might mean electricity gets more expensive for some members, and cheaper for others, but overall should lead to better usage across everyone. Basically socialism, applied to energy, so if you're OK with that for people, health and other things, maybe it makes sense to be fine with it for energy too?
What? Yes, it did work for the Euro, countries that are participating are now more equal than they were before, which is the goal. Who knows what will happen in the future, maybe Greece or someone else will truly sink the entire union, but it hasn't happened yet, so lets not confidently claim "it didn't work".
> my parents putting up solar panels to offset german fears of nuclear is far away from them paying taxes so their neighbor can get health care
That's been the thinking for a long time, but for how long can we continue thinking like this? If the world is fucked, it'll be fucked for all of us, not just for people in Sweden or Germany, so the faster we can realize we're all in the same boat, the better.
The same boat is actually a good metaphor, you tend to want many smaller ones and not one big, risk of losing everything vs something (to a point).
Yes, quite literally "hey lets suffer together", this is what we've signed up to, and want. Good for everyone and bad for everyone, we're linked and this helps us focus more on helping each other, rather than just focusing on ourselves.
> The same boat is actually a good metaphor, you tend to want many smaller ones and not one big, risk of losing everything vs something (to a point).
Yeah, that's probably the two mindsets that differ here. EU was created with the goal of "better one big boat than many small", because we've tried the "many small boats" approach for millennials, and somehow we in Europe always end up starting wars against each other. We've had (more or less) continent-wide peace now, for a good while (maybe the longest it's ever been? Not sure), and probably because of the reason that we're more connected now, instead of sitting alone in our tiny boats.
Currencies aren’t an asset. They don’t “outperform”.
If the Yuan had “outperformed” the Chinese economic system would have collapsed.
All this in a country where electricity was almost free (to be fair, our dismantling of nuclear doesn’t help here)
The solution to which is to generate even more power in Sweden (so you can sell it off cheap and have it cheap too) or that Germany produces power more cheaply so that it's not giving Sweden so much money for electricity. Both of these should happen if the market is set up well.
Unification needs to be real, including grids, not on paper only.