From Poland to Austria, sweltering nights are seeing wholesale prices reach crisis levels
The unprecedented June heatwave is driving European power prices into 2022 crisis territory, as demand for air conditioning peaks amid low nuclear and wind power output.
With the temperature forecast to climb yet higher on Wednesday night, buyers had to stump up over €1,000 per megawatt-hour on the Belgian day-ahead market to secure supplies.
While the impact is largely limited to traders, retailers and industrial consumers, who typically have complex hedging strategies in place, any Belgian with a solar panels, a smart meter, and a real-time price contract will have to pay through the nose to charge their EV or cool off once the sun goes down.
Joannes Laveyne of the Electrical Energy Lab at Ghent University said the surge could be a “new record power price for Belgium”. The reasons he gave were “increased consumption due to air conditioning” amid low wind and nuclear output.
