In the autumn of 2026, Europe found itself in a familiar trap. Wholesale gas prices on the TTF hub were up roughly 70% year on year. Winter power futures in Germany topped €180 per MWh, the highest since the 2022 crisis. Diesel at German filling stations pushed past €2.47 a liter, and in the Netherlands past €2.78. By the end of September, European gas storage was about 70% full, 12 percentage points below the level a year earlier. In a letter to ministers on 25 September, Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen called the situation outright “a price crisis linked to a supply crisis.”
The trigger was a new geopolitical storm: a conflict over Iran that began on 28 February 2026 and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for a large share of the world’s oil and LNG. Today, while European families cut heating bills and whole industries announce shifts of capacity outside the EU, the largest energy corporations and exporting countries are booking another wave of windfall profits.
Events from September into early October 2026 made plain that the euro area has still not recovered from the systemic energy shocks that began in 2022, when Europe was abruptly cut off from Russian pipeline gas. Prices then hit historic highs, and governments spent hundreds of billions of euros supporting households and businesses. By 2024–2025 wholesale prices had fallen, but household retail bills never returned to 2019–2021 levels. According to the latest ACER-CEER Retail Monitoring Report 2026 and Eurostat, the average European family spent about €840 on electricity and €1,170 on gas in 2025. That same year, 8.8% of EU residents could not keep their homes adequately warm. In Greece the figure was 18.1%, and in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe the situation is worse still. Estimates from Romania’s Intelligent Energy Association suggest that in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, 30–40% of households spend more than 10% of income on energy — the classic threshold of energy poverty. In 2026, fresh price rises landed on top of those already in place.
While citizens economise on basic heat, European industry is losing the foundation of its competitiveness. The International Energy Agency’s Electricity 2026 report finds that power costs for energy-intensive sectors in the EU — chemicals, metals, glass and building materials — are now more than twice those in the United States and about 50% higher than in China. The blow falls hardest on Europe’s industrial core: Germany and Central Europe. Public budgets are again cast as shock absorbers, reviving subsidy schemes and direct price caps and adding to deficits and public debt.
On the other side of this peculiar economic equation stands the oil and gas companies. An analysis by Transport & Environment, published in August 2026, found that just eight firms — Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, Eni, Orlen, Repsol, OMV and Moeve — booked about €7.5 billion in excess profit, attributable to EU operations in the first half of the year. Globally, excess profit from the same companies exceeded €17 billion. Six of the eight more than doubled their European profit in the second quarter compared with the same period in 2025.
Shares in several European oil companies have risen 40–87% since the start of 2026. TotalEnergies reported adjusted net income of $5.4 billion in the second quarter, up roughly 50–68% depending on the comparison base. Shell and BP also reported strong growth, including from trading and record refining margins. Equinor, controlled by the Norwegian state, is posting high revenue from gas sales into Europe at spot prices many times the cost of production.
Norway, whose government has revised its 2026 oil and gas revenue forecast upward to about $78 billion, has become one of the main national beneficiaries. Most of that money flows into the Government Pension Fund Global, already the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. American and Qatari LNG producers, along with major global traders, are extracting windfalls from intercontinental arbitrage, sending tankers to wherever the TTF spot price offers the widest margin.
Gas often remains the marginal fuel that sets the power price in hours of peak demand. Even with a rising share of renewables, the EU reached about 72% in 2026 — the price in critical periods is still set by the most expensive plant online. Refining margins have widened in parallel: the gap between crude and the price of diesel or petrol has hit record levels. Trading desks at the majors earn from volatility that consumers cannot avoid.
Retail prices for households fall more slowly than wholesale prices. Network tariffs, taxes and levies make up a large share of the bill; according to ACER, energy itself accounts for only about 48% of the average European electricity bill. The benefit of a wholesale drop therefore reaches the consumer late and only in part, while an increase arrives almost at once.
Attempts by European authorities to claw back these windfalls have so far run into a dead end. In 2022–2023 the EU introduced temporary mechanisms — a solidarity contribution and a revenue cap on infra marginal generation. By the Commission’s own estimates, they raised about €26 billion, well short of early expectations and only a small fraction of the €340 billion spent supporting households. Some companies managed to optimize profits through cross-border structures.
In the autumn of 2026, the debate flared again. Spain, Poland and Italy are pressing harder for an EU-wide windfall levy. The Commission, however, is extremely cautious, fearing an outflow of investors. National measures — lower excise duties and temporary subsidies — offer short-term relief but do not fix the structural dependence on imported fossil fuels.
The result is a deepening sense of unfairness. While families in Greece, Romania or eastern Germany cut back on heating, shareholders and managers of the large energy groups collect higher dividends and share buybacks. The social and political consequences are increasingly plain. The gap is widening between the industrial North and a less protected South and East. Skepticism toward public support for the “green transition” is growing citizens increasingly see environmental levies and the energy transformation as an extra tax, while corporations book record profits — which erodes trust in a “just transition.” In countries with a large share of energy-intensive industry, pressure is building to revisit climate targets or to introduce protectionist measures. The divide between the North — Norway in particular, as a beneficiary — and the South and East of Europe are becoming politically sensitive.
The causes of Europe’s energy instability in 2026 are not only the twists of geopolitics and markets, but a large-scale transfer of the cost of volatility from global producers and traders onto European citizens and industry. Until the way risk is shared changes — through permanent tax instruments, faster build-out of domestic generation and grids, or a radical cut in import dependence — every new crisis will reproduce the same pattern: bills rise for some, and windfall profits are booked by others.
