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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".
Marginal pricing is common for electricity, it's a weird system, but it doesn't have any impact on the level of democracy in EU.
Regarding prices going up if there is a catastrophe or war, that would happen with any system.
The gas shortage when Russia cut off the gas, made many politicians ask to have a 2nd look at these price structures, but apparently they have been unable to come up with a system that works better.
Want to bet how popular a system that basically funnel money from a state-owned company, consumers and industry towards companies producing absolutely nothing is? Was that done for the greater good?
France's state-owned company has delivered among the cheapest electricity in Europe, with a stable and reliable grid. Then it was decided that electricity should be a free market. "People of France, do you agree with that plan? -Fuck no!! -Too bad, LOL!" And later. "People of France, some of you could not afford to pay your bill due to this absurdly stupid and infuriating system. Do you want it to go away? -YES! -Well, fuck you then…"
No. If you balance the price weighing the cost of each source, 5% of the production going x10 does not make your bill go x10.
We had a system that worked much better. State-owned company EDF was offering cheap rates, solid grid, and was much better at planning that the mess we have now where anyone can suddenly put solar panels and wind turbines pretty much anywhere without consideration for the local grid and just demand to be connected to the grid and have their electricity bought full.
So ironically, increasing renewable in this chaotic way right now is increasing the overall cost: nuke work almost at constant cost. If you reduce their output so that you can take electricity from solar or wind, you have your constant nuke cost plus the price you pay to whoever turned on the renewable sources.
Note that I'm all for renewable and not opposed to getting out of nuke if that makes sense. But at the scale of a country, you need an architect to manage all of that. We no longer have one.
And the whole reason the current system was forced on France was because its cheaper electricity was giving it too much of a competitive advantage. That was not acceptable for our bigger neighbour on the east side.
The question was asked to Nicolas Sarkozy as to why he agreed to it (that was under his watch). He basically answered this was that or going back to internal wars in Europe (I'm not making this up). Maybe he's ideologically cabled to prefer free market (note that's not at all what we have at the end), maybe he got money from all these distributors racking up money not doing anything, maybe he was indeed constrained by his partners and got something in exchange, but he couldn't tell what (??). But that was the shit of an excuse.
That's your well working democracy. Fucking over a country for the benefit of a stronger one.