Looking under the “spot” light: opacity and visibility of transactions on the French electricity market during the European energy crisis
Résumé
This article explores how the French state managed the electricity market during the European energy crisis, revealing the limitations of economic expertise in contexts of opacity and institutional complexity. Drawing on market sociology and science and technology studies, the authors analyze how dominant framings—rooted in marginalist theory and auction-based transparency—oversimplified the structure of electricity exchanges, obscuring the redistributive consequences of market dynamics. Based on interviews, policy documents, and press analysis, the article shows how public and administrative actors relied on highly stylized representations of price formation that failed to account for the heterogeneity of contracts and trading timelines. The crisis exposed a gap between the state’s regulatory ambitions and its epistemic capacity. The analysis foregrounds the tensions between performative models of markets and the organizational routines that fail under exceptional stress. The article contributes to debates on the performativity of economic models, the politics of pricing infrastructures, and the uneven distribution of authority in liberalized sectors.
