We’re going off topic on ChatControl, but it’s not the parliament that decided it would require a supermajority, it was the Council. The parliament had rejected it twice at that stage, so the Council bruteforced the 3rd one by claiming the topic is urgent and send it to the vote before the members of parliament opposed to it could make sure they would all be able to vote.

When 2 sides disagree, in a democracy, you either find a common ground, or the majority makes the decision. In this case, it was voted 3 times, because a few didn’t like the results of the first two times, and with a trick on the third time to make sure the minority would have the last word. Democracy took a huge blow.

It’s true that nowhere in the EU a company could take over the supply. But the regulation created an absolute disaster in France, for example.

Under the regulation, and to jumpstart the competition (France was coming from a single state-owned company having a monopoly on electricity production and distribution: EDF), new distributors would be allocated some quota of production from EDF (mostly nuke) at a preferred and stable rates, and sell them to consumers “at market price”. EDF is still also a distributor, but has fixed determined rates.

The market price is determined by the cost of the most expensive source at a given time. So for example: if you’re running 90% on nuke, 5% on hydro, 4% on gas, and 1% on a old coal plant you had to restart, 100% of the rate during that period is priced based on the coal plant cost. Then there are complicated systems of buying some electricity ahead of time, on different time period, but that won’t be relevant for the rest of the story.

So you start off by literally having EDF giving startups that produce absolutely nothing cheap electricity that they resell at market price to consumers. And since the rates of EDF are regulated, the new “distributors” could take big shares of the market by being (totally artificially) cheaper than EDF.
This was by design: the startups would use the benefits to develop their own production.

Comes a bad alignment of planets: war in Ukraine and a sketchy decision to do maintenance on almost half of nuke plants at once, and the cost of electricity is now mostly driven by a gas price that is going out of control. New distributors (who had not developed the slightest production capacity, or way too few to be significant) see their own cost increase because of the gas price and they’re maxing their quota of EDF cheap nuke at preferred rate electricity. So they start by asking for a bigger quota (granted). But it’s not enough. So… they decide to massively dump their customers, non-renewing contracts or even cancelling them, suggesting customers to go back to EDF.

EDF still have regulated rates, cannot refuse customers, and is now swarmed by customers coming back… but it sold (by regulation) too much nuke electricity to the distributors, and has not enough left. So it had to buy back that electricity from distributors… with a premium, of course.

Meanwhile companies and consumers get eletricity bills that go 4, 5, up to 7x higher than usual. So (not the EU this time), France’s government makes a decision: the “rate shield”: basically they cap the bill charged to consumers… but the state pays the difference to the distributors (remember these still produce nothing on their own, and raked gigantic benefits until they ran out of cheap nuke electricity).

Despite all I wrote, I love the EU. Without it, each country is Europe would be worse off, maybe at war, maybe in economic crisis, maybe turned to a dictature. The EU makes them all stronger.

But I refuse to label it a “well working democracy”.