alt Hacker News>This is factually inaccurate
Yes, if you ignore the brief 2022 spike, they're as high as they ever been. Oh wow, you got me on a technicality, you're so clever, bravo, even though that doesn't change the situation of today where plenty of EU manufacturing companies have closed shop or moved jobs and manufacturing abroad since 2022.
From the link you posted, I see that energy today is still roughly 4x higher than it was before the Russian war, at least in my EU country. How competitive do you think EU manufacturing is today versus back then given the current pricing? How long can Eu companies stay in business given these circumstances? How long can EU taxpayers subsidize the energy of private business to make sure they don't go bust or leave before higher inflation kicks in?
Edit to answer your reply below here: No, the EU can't flip its energy producing industry on a dime in response to instantaneous external shocks. All it can do is print money and subsides energy costs for industry at the expense of inflation and higher CoL for the population.
Yes, energy is more expensive than when Europe received favorable fossil gas prices from Russia (as the Ember graphs demonstrate) prior to the Russo-Ukrainian war. Europe is not going back to Russia for energy. Europe has sufficient domestic renewable and low carbon (nuclear, hydro) energy potential to achieve a similar "energy cost ratio" as they previously achieved when cheap Russian fossil gas was procured. Europe will experience elevated energy prices until they have deployed enough renewables and storage to achieve historical energy costs.
How long it takes for Europe to achieve this outcome is a capital investment and deployment velocity decision. The capital exists, the technology and manufacturing capacity exists. How competitive does Europe want to be from a manufacturing perspective? The answer to that is the speed at which they drive down energy costs using the various technologies I've enumerated.
I've reached out to an Ember contact to inquire if they could communicate this time window and velocity in some fashion on their graphs for Europe ("time to historical energy price levels via energy transition").