The author's point is that Spain's electricity is very cheap compared to other European countries thanks to its great electricity mix, etc.
The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].
The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.
You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).
Spain's neighbors could also have lower energy prices with more interconnection to Spain. The whole network diversifies, which would be more beneficial for Europe as a whole.
That would raise electricity prices in Spain just like prices in Sweden - which traditionally had low prices - went up with the 'diversification' of the European distribution network. While these price effects were mostly seen in the southern half of the country due to the way Sweden is divided into 4 price regions with most of the interconnects being found in the southern-most region the recently inaugurated 'Aurora' interconnect with Finland caused prices in the north of Sweden to shoot up [1].
The issue is that Spain has three interconnected neighbours (France, Portugal and Morocco) and all of them are overflowing with electricity.
The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.
Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.
That's not my point. My point is that the price spread between EU electricity markets speaks more to the availability of interconnections than to the virtues of one country's electricity mix. The article gets to that conclusion because that's what it was looking for.
The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.
This is a lesson in how electricity isn't really a commodity e.g. it's very very difficult to send some electrons from one side of the world to another.
But all commodities are like this. It is actually pretty easy to send some electrons great distances, or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem. It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
> or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
Unfortunately in Britain at least politicians are absolutely dead set on taking the piss / abusing this by e.g. adding huge amounts of subsidy and stealth taxes into what should be price discovery mechanisms (or for example when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes).
The reality is that expensive electricity in the EU is by design. The EU ETS imposes heavy taxes on fossil fuels (and they are set to increase even more), which in turn causes the price of electricity to rise. Fully renewable electricity generation is still a long way off, so this will continue for a long time. But it is entirely a self-imposed political problem and could easily be fixed by getting rid of the EU ETS or capping the price of emissions at a more reasonable level.
The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.
Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
> made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear
They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
Also worth tracking whether consumption is increasing. Rebound Effect can kick in - when energy prices fall most people use more energy, produce/consume more junk, use more heat/cooling etc. Its like dealing with very low interest rates. It can produce a whole lot of brainless behaviour.
Spain is one of the largest buyers of Russian LNG [1], even doubled in March compared to February 2026 and has been linked to servicing "shadow fleet" tankers carrying Russian oil [2].
The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].
The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/8e94079c-585f-11e4-b331-00144feab...
[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/Exwx4A/elprissmocka-...
The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.
Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.
The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
In most places, if you buy more of something, you are a good customer, it is usually more economical to sell to you and you get a discount.
In california people who use more kilowatts, pay more.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?
Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.
https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/
They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
Like Canada and in the future also Sweden? Two really hostile countries to be dependent on.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.
Moral bankruptcy.
[1] https://cepa.org/article/spains-baffling-russian-gas-addicti...
[2] https://kyivindependent.com/spain-escorts-shadow-fleet-vesse...