I remember when in school in history class we all were upset when we learnt that the land lord demanded a "tenth" from the agricultural gains.
Those were the times...
Quite honestly, if a bank robber goes into a bank and shoots himself into his foot, saying: 'now imagine what I could do to you' - I'd be pretty impressed!
Electricity prices for consumers currently are heavily subsidized in France because otherwise there would be riots: spot market prices are regularly above 0.40€ and the current end user price would probably be around 0.80€.
OVH is a business, thus they have to pay the real prices.
In the end we will all pay via massive inflation for the competence of the European politicians.
They also have a big datacenter here in quebec impacted by the rate increae, and our electricity prices haven't really increased. Prices for industrial uses here are around 0.08-11$(CAD) per kWh.
(Edit: to be clear the OVH rate increase is still pretty reasonable, and is justified by other factors)
Yeah, it is actually crazy how cheap even the listed prices (for example L-rate pricing) can be here. I'm surprised we don't have more datacenters (there are lots of them, but not as much as I'd have thought).
All the regulation being in French, and the translated versions not being considered official is such a hindrance to doing anything in Quebec. Everything becomes substantially more complicated, involves a lot more people, and it is disjoint with the entire rest of Canada and the US in terms of your compliance and your staff. You can see why companies would avoid it even given the rather incredible cost reductions their power cost would offer.