If you take away the incentive that citizens have to cut back a energy use, if you subsidize their use too heavily, then citizens have no reason to stop using electricity and gas. The other big risk is that if you do these kinds of interventions country by country, you can end up bidding against each other. You're just competing against each other to hand out more money to energy producers. That's why it's so important to address this at a european level - ursula von derlyon has laid out five ideas. She wants to reduce electricity use at peak times,. Another idea is to cap the revenues of electricity producers who have low generating costs because they use renewables.