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Europe’s second energy crisis largely skipped the solar hours

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Europe’s second energy crisis largely skipped the solar hours

Europe has now lived through two energy crises in four years, and on the surface the second looks like a smaller copy of the first. In Spain, Germany and Greece, day-ahead prices rose in both, and in each case the shock followed a war that began in late February. Underneath, the two crises played out very differently across the day. In the months after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the cheapest hour of the average day still cost €149 ($165.6)/MWh in Spain, €193/MWh in Germany and €252/MWh in Greece. Between March and September 2026, front-month TTF averaged roughly €54/MWh, about half as much again as in the same months of 2025, which puts the fuel cost of a gas plant running at 55% efficiency near €97/MWh before carbon. Yet averaged over the 2026 window, the cheapest hour of the day fell to between €16/MWh and €25/MWh in all three markets, far below what any gas plant needed to run, while night prices rose by €36 to €51/MWh against the same dates in 2025.

That difference is consistent with the much larger solar fleet that sits between the two shocks. Average output in the peak solar hour doubled in Spain and Greece between the 2022 and 2026 windows and rose by half in Germany, and prices in the hours that output covers moved far less with fuel prices than they did four years ago. This analysis asks what that larger fleet means for energy security: how much of the day now stays clear of crisis prices, why that stops at sunset, and how far battery storage could carry it into the evening and night.


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