The author says electricity should be treated as a public (common) good. The debate continues.
The urgency of decarbonising Europe requires policy consistency, not ad hoc reactions incompatible with open-market rules. And rather than asking the commission to ‘assess whether certain trading behaviours require further regulatory action’, the European Council at its last meeting should have considered an unorthodox solution—removing electricity as a private commodity from a liberalised market and treating it as a public good.
It’s the state which casts the largest and safest social safety-net to catch the causalities of the market descending into the depths of poverty. Karl Polyani rightly contended that ‘laissez-faire was planned’ and the commission should abandon such ‘planning’ as the recent Market Stability Reserve and new electricity market rules, which fail to recognise that ‘free’ markets are an artificial creation. Instead, it should recognise that, as a public good, electricity should be supplied in a non-rival, non-exclusive fashion—and so socialised.