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Method note · measured

Capture price and value factor

What it measures

The average price wind or solar power earned, weighted by how much each produced in each hour, set against the plain average price.

Inputs

  • ENTSO-E day-ahead price for the DE-LU bidding zone (Germany and Luxembourg, which share one wholesale price), hourly
  • ENTSO-E actual generation per production type for DE-LU, hourly, grouped into wind, solar and the other fuels

Method and weighting

The capture price is the generation-weighted mean of the hourly price: each hour's price counts in proportion to how much the technology produced in that hour, so an hour with no output counts for nothing. The baseload price is the plain average over every hour of the window, what a plant running flat out all the time would have earned. The value factor is the capture price divided by the baseload price: below one, the technology earns less than average because it produces when the others do too. The negative-price share is the part of the technology's output that was produced in hours with a price below zero.

Window

The rolling 12 months to the last complete day, refreshed on the 1st and 15th of each month. Data last refreshed on .

Known limits

  • Since the German day-ahead market moved to quarter-hour prices, those prices are averaged to the hour first, so the weighting sits on the canonical hourly grid.
  • The weighting uses metered generation, which includes output that was later paid to switch off, so the capture price is that of everything that ran.
  • Hours with a gap in either series, and hours with no output, are left out of the weighting.

Used on

Sources: ENTSO-E. Each is described on the Data sources page.