On ghost consumers, compounding choices, and a €1.54 line item that says more than it should. Are we being taxed for trying?
My electricity bill arrived this week.
Line item: perdite di rete — network losses. €1.54. A standardised charge covering energy dissipated as heat across the transmission grid. Every domestic customer pays it as a percentage of their consumption, regardless of what they contribute to that grid.
I have solar panels on my balcony. I installed them in February 2023. Since then, my average monthly consumption has dropped by 10-20%, depending on the weather conditions. I generate electricity.
I reduce what I draw. I still pay, in full, the standardised penalty for everyone else’s losses. The perdite di rete charge alone offsets a meaningful share of what my panels actually save.
This is not a complaint about €1.54. It is an observation about what it costs to design a system around the wrong person — and, right now, about how that cost compounds.
The ghost consumer
European energy markets are under acute pressure again. The countries absorbing the sharpest price spikes share a common feature: deep structural dependence on imported gas, and political traditions of managing that dependence through price interventions rather than redesigning the underlying system.
Italy has arrived at this moment having chosen, consistently, the visible fix. The mechanism is this: the marginal pricing system prices all electricity — including solar and wind — at the cost of the last unit dispatched, which is almost always gas, of which Italy imports over 95%. Renewable electricity is priced as though it were expensive. Because the alternative is. And even where solar and wind have genuinely lowered wholesale prices, most retail tariffs in the EU have failed to pass those cost advantages on to households — the network charge architecture absorbs the gain before it reaches the bill. Italian household electricity prices exceed €30 per 100 kWh. The structural response has been a €200 one-off payment for low-income households — announced by decree, photographed at press conferences, calculated to last one billing cycle.
Spain looked at the same problem and decided to change the exposure rather than cushion it. Over the past five years, new wind and solar plants there avoided 26 billion cubic metres of gas imports — savings of €13.5 billion, almost five times what Spain invested in its entire transmission grid over the same period. The Central Bank of Spain calculated that wholesale electricity prices would have been 40% higher in the first half of 2024 without that investment. Today, fossil fuels cover 20% of Spain’s electricity demand, against 43% in Italy. Spanish households pay €26 per 100 kWh. When the latest supply shock arrived, Spain weathered it. Italy felt it.
The gap between them is not geography, sunlight, or economic scale. It is a decade of compounding political choices, now legible on every bill.
The ghost consumer — passive, dependent, with no ability or interest in participating in his own energy system — remains the implicit reference point for the countries that chose not to invest. He is a remarkably durable fiction. He doesn’t generate. He doesn’t store. He doesn’t adjust. He just pays. And when the price spikes, he gets a voucher.
The pronoun is deliberate. The system was designed around a particular kind of actor — one whose relationship to energy is extractive, not participatory, and whose domestic life is managed by someone else. That someone else is where the real story is.
Willing, and still paying for it
The ghost consumer is not just a political problem. He is embedded in the design of almost every flexibility instrument the EU has built.
A peer-reviewed systematic review published this March, drawing on 66 empirical studies of demand-side response programmes across Europe, reaches a finding that should be uncomfortable for anyone who has written the words “consumer empowerment” in a policy document: vulnerable households are frequently willing to participate. What stops them is not reluctance. It is the texture of their daily lives — caring responsibilities, health conditions, inflexible routines, insecure tenure.
For sick households, poorly designed dynamic tariffs can increase energy bills by up to 20%. Those who can adapt their consumption will increasingly be rewarded; those who cannot will increasingly pay for it. The system looked at a household with a chronically ill member and concluded: not flexible enough. That is not a market outcome. It is a design choice.
The review also names something the policy debate still treats as decorative: within households, someone decides which technology to adopt, and someone else reorganises daily life around it. That second person — adjusting routines, absorbing the demands the system places on a home she did not design — appears nowhere in the cost-benefit analyses that justify these programmes. Consumer empowerment frameworks that ignore her redistribute burden, not agency.
The Citizens’ Energy Package names farmers, carers, rural inhabitants and kindergartens as the citizens the transition must serve. Between that language and the lived reality of a household trying to participate, there is a gap the legislation has identified but not yet closed.
The renovation room nobody built
That gap has a texture. It shows up in buildings.
48% of EU citizens live in flats. When those flat-dwellers try to act — to install solar, a heat pump, a battery, to participate in the system they are paying to sustain — they find that the approval mechanisms either don’t exist, don’t function, or weren’t built for the person making the request.
What fills the gap is not institutions. It is community. Thousands of people, mostly women, navigate renovation decisions together in peer networks — researching materials, sequencing multi-year projects, building enough confidence to act in an environment that consistently fails to recognise them as the person in charge. Contractors who address the absent partner. Lenders whose risk criteria don’t reflect their profile. Funding schemes that assume unobstructed access to capital.
This is governance — distributed, honest about failure, built from the kind of knowledge that only comes from someone who has been through it. It exists because the institutional tools are not designed to hold what people actually need: not more information, but the texture that comes from lived experience. The kind that is, by definition, invisible to a system built around a ghost.
The question of whether the Renovation Wave, the EPBD transposition across 27 member states, and the Citizens’ Energy Package can function without accounting for this layer will be answered by the next policy cycle — by accident, and probably too late for the people currently doing the work without being counted.
What price fixes buy
Governments facing acute energy costs have a choice. They can address the mechanism — who the system was built for, what it costs people who don’t fit that profile, and what structural changes would broaden access. Or they can fix the price, take the credit, and defer the structural question to the next crisis.
The tools exist. Tariffs that combine dynamic pricing with genuine price caps so that flexibility rewards households without penalising those whose consumption is not discretionary. Network charges redesigned as a fairness lever rather than a flat tax on participation. Financing mechanisms that allow the households who want to generate, store, and share electricity to actually do so — including the 48% who live in flats. These are not theoretical instruments. They are design choices, available now, waiting for the political will to prioritise them over the press conference.
In 2025, the EU power sector’s gas import bill rose to €32 billion, 16% higher than the previous year, with Italy and Germany paying the most. The countries that made different investments over the previous decade are, right now, less exposed. The countries that chose the voucher are discovering that vouchers don’t compound.
Structural investment does.
The €1.54 on my bill is trivial. What it represents — a system that has not yet registered what I am doing on my balcony, or what millions of people like me are trying to do — is not. That gap has a price. Right now, it is rising.
Three recent Energ’ Ethic Podcast conversations sit behind this newsletter: 🎧 Ep. 92 with Aurore Dudka (Ph.D) — on why willing households keep being left out of flexibility programmes, and what it would take to change that 🎧 Ep. 93 with Ashley Grealish of Windfall Energy — on designing for the user the system keeps leaving out, from off-grid Africa to a London flat 🎧 Ep. 91 with Ellora Coupe — on the governance infrastructure renovation policy forgot to build
