Paul-Frederik Bach, a former transmission system operator executive, started tracking European wholesale electricity prices on his blog in 2014. He used a colored map for different price bands. By 2016, he told GTM, prices in some markets had risen so much “I had to invent new colors.”
This tale underscores a vexing problem for the energy transition in Europe. While renewables’ levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is going down, and the proportion of renewables on many grids is growing, wholesale electricity markets don’t seem to be getting any cheaper.