There's a critical meeting today of EU finance ministers where they will lay out plans to coordinate policy on the energy crisis. These ideas have floated before and it looks like they're going to throw everything at this.
- Cap revenues of non-gas power generators
- Taxing fossil fuel companies on profits
- Emergency temporary interventions including a gas price cap
- Design emergency liquidity instruments to help energy market participants facing margin calls
- EU proposals should be delivered by mid-Sept
These are all still proposals but you can see which way it's heading. None of this is going to help improve supply in the short or medium term. The EU certainly wasn't lining up to help fossil fuel companies when prices were negative.
These ideas all leaked before and now it looks like they've pushed the timeline to proposals by mid-Sept and a decision some time after that. The clock is ticking though and it's hard to say if any of this sticks or they skip directly to subsidies (which have started to trickle out).
It will be tough to get full agreement on many of these proposals so we might end up with voluntary guidelines.