"Looking at the average electricity prices on the “Day Ahead” market for tomorrow – record highs across Europe and especially in southern Sweden, Denmark and Germany – I can make a reasonable assumption that the wind is planning to take a vacation, which unpleasantly coincides with the first longer breaks in the sun. Just as direct is the dependence of the availability and price of electricity in the aforementioned regions and the average wind speed and duration of sunshine there..."
This is how my Sunday text begins on the issue of the exploding prices on the “Day Ahead” market in Europe. Today, Monday's data is available and we can check yesterday's assumption.
I start with the elephant in the room - Germany. At 7:45 p.m. yesterday, the price of electricity there reached 740 euros/MWh - a new record for 2026. Consumption is 58.1 GW, and production - only 41.8 GW. This means that at this moment the largest European economy had to import 16.3 GW or 28% of its current consumption to satisfy the system load. Just for comparison - this is about 4 TIMES more than the average load of Bulgaria in the summer. Another important aspect - this huge shortage fortunately occurs at a time of relatively low consumption. On a cold winter evening, consumption there regularly exceeds 75 GW. However, the available plants are the same.
Exactly according to my Sunday assumption, the wind was on vacation - 71 GW of onshore wind farms provided under 380 MW of power, that is, only 0.5% of the entire installed wind capacity on land was operating. The 11 GW offshore plants have added 1.5 GW, which is a little more. The sun is now completely absent from the system. The end result is that 200 GW of installed system RES provide less than 2 GW of load.
Of course, the huge hole in the balance is filled primarily by coal and gas-fired power plants - a total of 28 GW. Among them, despite all political mantras with a particularly high level of utilization, the "dirtiest" lignite power plants stand out - 11.3 out of 14.8 GW of installed capacity are operating. The presence of gas-fired power plants, so beloved in Germany, is remarkably weak - only 9.6 out of 35.3 GW are operating. Yes, the price of fuel matters.
The following graph shows a similar situation in Denmark at the same 7:45 PM.
The difference is that they no longer have significant thermal power plants, so they have to import 43% of the electricity needed by the system. The corresponding peak price reaches 756 euros/MWh.
The data on energy-charts.info strangely does not show the role of modern batteries in the whole thing, and there are a lot of them in both mentioned countries. I assume that they are simply not reflected. If they were of significant importance to the system, however, the prices would not be like this. And we are only talking about the first summer episode of evening wind subsidence. The situation in winter would be far more complicated.
The power systems of Germany and Denmark, but also Belgium and the UK, are entirely dependent on the vagaries of the wind.
When it blows, there is cheap electricity. When it stops, there is still electricity - the other European countries have not committed suicide by their energy sector on such a scale - but it is very expensive. This means that the European industrial engine is a work in progress.