The duck is coming

Short post on the duck's arrival in the EU power markets

This is a quick post on the duck's arrival in power prices. Let’s compare the month of March 2023 with different other months for four bidding zones: Netherlands, Italy-Sardinia, Spain, and Greece. The graphs computed here are monthly average prices for each hour of the day, on the day-ahead market.

The minimal price is happening around noon for all the bidding zones presented here. The maximal price is then happening in the evening and the difference can be large such as Italy-Sardinia with an average price of 58.6 EUR/MWh at 12 AM and 202.5 EUR/MWh at 6 PM.

Let’s see the same curves for January 2023, a month with less solar generation and higher consumption. Besides the fact that average prices were much higher, except for Spain due to the Iberian exception, we observe that the duck effect is not very clearly present.

For the month of March 2021, the effect is not as clear as for March 2023. The prices during the lunch break are at a similar level to the prices during the night, suggesting a weaker effect of solar generation on the market prices.

We are going to analyze further these trends in the coming months and we will keep you posted. We are expecting to observe more clearly this effect in the coming months as consumption is decreasing and solar generation is higher.