Market Report 2025

A year of Dunkelflaute and Hellbrise

The weather is keeping the European power industry busy. The phenomena of Dunkelflaute and Hellbrise are occurring more and more frequently.

Record growth in renewables: 60 per cent of net generation came from solar, wind and other sources in 2024, as the Amprion Market Report 2025 shows. Meanwhile, the Dunkelflaute in November is a reminder of the potential challenges that this circumstance poses for the security of supply in the future. After all, the greatly accelerated expansion of renewables goes hand in hand with the decommissioning of coal-fired power stations.

The expansion of renewables, which is actually a welcome development, is also creating new challenges in other respects: Around half of German PV producers receive fixed feed-in tariffs that do not depend on market prices and offer no incentive to reduce their production in the event of negative prices. The situation is therefore different for PV systems than for wind turbines in direct marketing. This can lead to an oversupply of electricity, which in turn pushes prices into negative territory. This was the case for several hours in the summer.

Better integration of renewable power generation

However, times when total renewable electricity production exceeds electricity demand - known as Hellbrise - do not just affect prices. They pose considerable challenges for grid and system operation in terms of congestion management and, in particular, system balancing. What does this mean? In order to better integrate renewable electricity generation into the grid, more flexibility is required from consumers, small PV assets and storage systems.

Meanwhile, Amprion is continuing to work on expanding the transmission network and improving cross-zonal trading capacities in order to fully utilise the advantages of the integrated European electricity market. The need for redispatch in Germany remains high. This is reflected in the transmission bottlenecks and emphasises the need to further strengthen the grid.
The conclusion for 2024:

• The energy transition is on the right track, but there are challenges ahead.
• The network infrastructure must be further improved.
• Flexible generation capacity must be expanded.

Renewable energy generation is becoming increasingly important for the market. Active action is needed to keep the market stable under the changed conditions and ensure security of supply.

CONTACT

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