As a Swede(working in the energy sector no less), Sweden has only themselves to blame for their catastrophic decisions, like killing a world leading nuclear industry. Don’t blame Germany for Swedens incredibly stupid decision to shut down functioning nuclear reactors prematurely.

Wanna tell us more? Why has unifying the energy market been catastrophic for Sweden?

It's the Euro all over again, mostly because of this:

> 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?

I think you’re getting cause and effect wrong.

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...

So you suggestion is to remove the taxes and go back to mostly using coal for power? Or what's the suggestion here? Because those taxes are there because of the pollution, so unless you have better way of getting rid of the pollution yet using coal for power, I'm not sure there is something better than trying to tax it away so other source can be focused by business and industry instead.

Energy is expensive because fossil fuels are destroying the only planet we have.

If a person is taking lifesaving medicine that unfortunately makes their skin itch, you wouldn't call itchiness "a problem which they have created themselves in the first place"...

That is a dubious claim of the accounting chain for expense of fossil fuels, which also ignores defensive tariffs for energy sources like Chines manufactured solar, wind and batteries. Though maybe it speaks to more beaucratic process around the energy not the core energy costs itself.

And how pays for the healthcare that's indeed for the people downwind of that plant? How much does lung cancer treatment cost compared to coal?

Europe is energy poor. We will never be able to compete on raw cost with the US, China and similar.

Our path forward are through renewables, which today are vastly cheaper than fossil fuels.

We decide the speed of the transition to green cheap energy by how much we tax fossil fuels. Low taxes = slow transition. High taxes = fast transition.