Elevated Solar Hour Prices sustain high baseload power prices

The Dutch spot price for electricity averaged 87.19 €/MWh this week, almost identical to last week’s 87.15 €/MWh. In Germany, the price was slightly higher at 88.60 €/MWh (an increase of €2.05 €/MWh). While both morning peaks and evening peaks remained relatively moderate, the morning peak reached a maximum of 124 €/MWh and evening peaks fluctuated between 120-147 €/MWh. The sustained high baseload prices were primarily driven by solar hours, where minimum prices reached as high as 71.20 €/MWh.
The 18th of July marked the most expensive day, with the Dutch power baseload clearing at €100.83 and prices ranging between 71.20 €/MWh and 99.21 €/MWh for the solar hours 09:00 to 18:00 (hours where solar generation is usually high). These expensive solar hours can be attributed to a combination of below-average wind and solar generation across the week in the BENELUX region and Germany. Despite the outage of the COBRA cable, which connects the Netherlands and Denmark from July 14 to July 18, solar generation in Germany was significantly lower than the seasonal norm, which may have contributed towards high solar hours in Netherlands. The coinciding low renewable output across all these countries created a perfect storm, leading to persistently high prices during solar hours for four days in the week for Netherlands. Furthermore, two large coal plants with a combined capacity of around 1.8 GW remained unavailable in Netherlands.