Tariff shields and turning off lights: how Europe is tackling the energy crisis
Governments across Europe are scrambling to cushion citizens from soaring energy prices and have so far allocated a total of about €280bn (£240bn) to helping reduce the impact of the crisis, according to the thinktank Bruegel.
Pressure is mounting for joint action beyond a voluntary 15% cut in consumption agreed in July, and the EU will hold an emergency summit on 9 September to discuss measures including a bloc-wide price cap.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said this week the bloc was working on “an emergency intervention and a structural reform of [Europe’s] electricity market”, whose limitations are being cruelly exposed.
Options include an emergency block-wide price cap, and – more fundamentally – a decoupling of electricity and gas prices, a move backed by several member states and adopted as an “Iberian exception” this summer by Spain and Portugal with the aim of slashing electricity bills.
Under the present EU-wide mechanism, electricity prices are pegged to the price of the most expensive fuel used in power generation, which is currently natural gas – whose price has surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sending electricity prices soaring too.
Encouragingly, the continent’s gas storage reservoirs, which will be critical to getting through the winter, have reached the commission’s 80% capacity target two months ahead of schedule, and Spain, Italy, Germany and France have exceeded it.
But the coming months nonetheless look likely to be tough for millions across the continent. Here is a look at the scale of the energy crisis in several European countries, and – with Britain’s government accused of inaction – what capitals are doing about it.
France has frozen gas prices at October 2021 levels
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