Europe’s power markets in 2025: record renewables, record volatility - and a procurement reset
Europe has arrived in the post-crisis era with powerr surplus-at-noon, scarcity-at-6pm. The result is a market where price signals are sharper, negative hours are common, and the value of a MWh depends heavily on when it’s delivered. In this environment, energy procurement is less about buying volume and more about managing profile risk, flexibility, and contract design.
What changed?
Negative prices scaled up across major EU markets in 2025.
Gas demand stayed structurally lower than pre-crisis levels, while LNG infrastructure risks underutilisation.
The market time resolution tightened: EU day-ahead trading shifted to 15-minute intervals (from 30 Sept 2025 / delivery 1 Oct).
Corporate PPAs slowed, reflecting tougher pricing and “shape cost” realities.
EU: “Baseload thinking” breaks in a negative-price world
Across Europe, renewables are now large enough to reshape the price curve, not just lower average prices. The same grid can feel overloaded and constrained within the same day. At lunchtime on a bright, windy Sunday, power can be so abundant that wholesale hourly prices go negative, sometimes even daily. Later, when people cook, commute, and industry ramps, the system leans again on flexible plants, imports, and whatever storage exists. The big shift isn’t that electricity is simply cheaper: it’s that value swings wildly by the hour, and the system is still learning how to route, store, and reward clean generation without wasting it.
Hungary: record solar generation, record exposure to “shape”
Hungary’s solar build-out has become a national-scale story: in just a few years it moved from “nice add-on” to something that can carry the country through peak sun. Crossing 8 GW of solar capacity and reaching a 99.8% load-cover moment on 13 June 2025 are the kind of milestones that change public perception: imports no longer feel like destiny. But the deeper narrative is the new daily rhythm: midday strength, evening vulnerability. When solar dominates, the question becomes what to do with the excess (store it, shift demand into it, export it), and how to keep evenings stable without leaning too hard on expensive or carbon-heavy options.
Greece: renewable powerhouse - with a “spilled sunshine” problem and huge untapped upside
Greece’s 2025 story has two layers. The first is leadership: 74% renewables in Q1 and a growing role as a regional supplier when the sun is high. The second is frustration: even with world-class sun and strong wind corridors, Greece still had to curtail around 1.3 TWh in the first half of 2025, not because the energy wasn’t there, but because the system couldn’t always move it to where it was needed. That’s also where the “enormous potential” sits: Greece has far more clean electricity available in its geography than it can currently monetize, from saturated nodes on the mainland to island systems, and from future storage to expanded interconnectors. In other words (and not just for the home of wine-dark sea): the resource is not the limit; integration is.
For buyers, 2025 is a reminder that electricity is no longer
a “single price for a single product”, it’s a time-shaped risk.
The winning approach shifts from one-off hedging to active energy purchase advisory: when to fix, when to unfix (and whether to unfix at all), and how to avoid being locked into yesterday’s logic when midday prices collapse and evening peaks stay expensive. On the contract side, flexibility is king: more optionality (indexation choices, volume bands, shaping, caps/floors, revisit clauses), diversified supply (mixing grid purchases, structured products, PPAs, and self-generation), and clear rules on imbalance/curtailment exposure.
Operationally, the biggest unlocks are increasingly behind-the-meter: batteries and arbitrage, smart scheduling, and demand adjustment (moving load into cheap hours). In short: procurement becomes a blend of market timing, contract design, and flexibility strategy, and that’s exactly where expert support can turn volatility from a threat into an advantage.