A field guide to European power markets
Prices went negative, the bill went up, wind farms were paid to switch off. Wattlas takes the open data behind those headlines, Germany first and then the rest of Europe, and turns it into 41 short views, one question each, sources on the page.
03 · Geography of Price
Wind in the north, demand in the south and one price between them, so turbines are switched off while gas plants run in their place. 14,4 TWh of wind and solar were switched off in Germany over the last two years.
01 · The Daily Rhythm
Solar makes most of its power at the same hours everywhere, so the price is lowest just when there is most of it. Over the last 12 months a German solar megawatt-hour earned 0,57× the average price.
05 · The Bill
The wholesale price is one part of a household bill; network charges, levies and taxes make up the rest. A German household pays 38,5 ct/kWh in 2025 (Eurostat).
07 · The Load
A question to an AI model is answered in a data centre, and the electricity it takes leaves the building as heat. One text prompt takes 0,24 Wh on Google's fleet median, by its own account; in Ireland, which meters its data centres, 23% of the electricity went to them in 2025.
04 · When the Grid Is Tested
Commercial-size batteries fill from the midday sun and empty into the evening peak. 768 MW are running in Germany by the latest count in the national plant register, district by district.
Hour by hour
Wattlas told as one German day: what moves the price of power and what the site shows, every figure with its window.
1 of 6: Paid to switch off
When does power move?
Electricity has no single price. It has a price every hour, and since October 2025 every quarter-hour. It swings between cheap and expensive, day to day and year to year.
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What's flowing through the wires?
Behind every price is a physical mix of fuels. This is what generates Europe's power hour to hour, and how clean or dirty each hour is.
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Where does power flow, and why do prices split?
One country, one price, until the grid can't carry the power across it. Germany, France, the Nordics and Britain are mapped here: four answers to the same bottleneck.
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What happens when supply runs tight?
A renewable grid's hardest hours: the windless, sunless spells it must plan for, the batteries that ride the gap, and whether there is enough capacity behind them when the gap runs long.
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What does it cost, and who pays?
The wholesale price is only the start of a bill. Network charges, levies and taxes come on top, and flexibility and curtailment have a price of their own.
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What's plugging into the grid?
Millions of cars and the first electric lorries are a new load on the grid, and the first big one that can choose when it draws. Road transport's share of all the electricity Germany consumed: 1,25% in 2024. Where vehicles plug in, what they draw, what charging costs, and how far the charging network has got.
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What does AI draw from the grid?
Data centres were a flat line on the grid for the best part of a decade, until the cloud and then AI. Few countries meter them. Ireland does: there they took 23% of the electricity in 2025.
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What gets built, and how fast?
Solar became the world's largest source of new capacity in the 2020s: 2.391 GW stood at the end of 2025, 11 times the fleet of 2015 (Ember). Where it went, how fast, and how much of the time it runs.
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