Price spikes
Client: 50Hertz
Neon team: Silvana Tiedemann, Lion Hirth
Published: 2025
In winter 2024, day-ahead prices in Germany reached 936 €/MWh, exceeding even energy-crisis levels and raising concerns about capacity withholding. For TSO 50Hertz, we identified price spikes using a conservative merit-order benchmark — 31 hours between 2015 and 2024, all in 2023–24 — and analyzed generation plant by plant. Most capacity that did not run had plausible technical or operational explanations; the pattern points to genuine scarcity rather than systematic withholding. We derived recommendations, including a consistent database of actually available capacity for the design of a capacity market. This report was originally published in German.
Dr. Johanna Bronisch
bronisch@neon.energy
+49 155 61 042 055
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