Grey skies, windless weather push hourly electricity price to record high
The average hourly energy price reached a record high on Wednesday and is even 50 percent higher today. Between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, electricity will cost a massive 1.2 euros per kilowatt hour, NOS reports. The typical price is around 30 cents per kilowatt hour.
The weather is the main cause of today’s high electricity prices. “It is grey, so there’s little solar energy, and there’s no wind, so there’s hardly any wind energy either,” energy expert Martien Visser at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen told the broadcaster.
That means a higher demand for gas energy. “And relatively many gas-fired power stations are undergoing maintenance at the moment,” Visser said. Gas power is already more expensive than that from the renewable sources, and the prices are pushed even higher by fewer gas-fired power stations being available.
This is only relevant to the over 350,000 Dutch households who have a dynamic energy contract. They pay the hourly rate for electricity, which they receive a day in advance via an app. Best for them not to charge their cars or run their heating between 5:00 and 6:00 this afternoon.
The vast majority of Netherlands residents have a fixed or variable energy contract and won’t notice the record high energy price. The about 4 million people with a fixed contract have their energy prices fixed for one or more years. The over 3 million people with a variable contract get their prices adjusted once per quarter.
The electricity price will drop back to a more normal level of around 30 cents per kilowatt hour after 10:00 p.m. tonight.
This is the downside of a dynamic energy contract. On the upside, the electricity price often dropped to negative amounts around noon in the summertime. At those times, people with a dynamic contract paid much less than other Netherlands residents for the power they used.
