The year 2025 is drawing to a close. This is a good time to take a look at developments in the electricity market. Since the beginning of the year, around 13.9 GW of solar and 3.8 GW of wind power capacity have been newly installed in Germany. Although this means that 2025 will see the second-highest increase in installed wind and solar energy capacity, the expansion rates remain below the targets set by the last federal government. At the same time, the share of renewable energies exceeded 50% in all months except January – and even reached around 76% in May and June.[1]

The graph shows the relationship between net electricity exports (x-axis), the day-ahead electricity price (y-axis) and the share of wind and photovoltaic (PV) energy in the total feed-in in Germany for the years 2021 to 2025. Each point represents a 15-minute interval. Light-coloured points indicate a high feed-in of PV and wind energy at the given time, while dark points indicate a low feed-in.
Several trends can be discerned from the scatter plots:

• The price-export relationship is declining (orange line): high prices are increasingly occurring during import hours, low prices during export hours.
• The number of hours with negative electricity prices has risen steadily. In 2021, the exchange electricity price was negative for a total of 139 hours. By 25 November this year, it had already reached 575 hours, or just under three and a half weeks.
• The scatter plot is shifting to the left: Germany is increasingly becoming a net electricity importer.
• Extreme values are on the rise: net imports at particularly high prices and net exports at particularly low prices are becoming more frequent.

This fact is often cited in abbreviated form to portray the expansion of renewable energies as economically damaging. However, this fails to take into account that electricity exchange stabilises the grids of all participating countries and that electricity becomes cheaper throughout the year as a result of trade with other countries. Germany also benefits economically from this.

At the same time, these developments highlight structural deficits in the electricity market design: strong winds and abundant sunshine lead to electricity surpluses, while periods of low wind and low sunlight lead to electricity shortages. There are various options for increasing flexibility, such as electricity price zones (see also our Figure of the Month 9/2025), dynamic electricity tariffs and flexible reserve power plants. Battery storage is also a rapidly growing option due to the drastic fall in prices, as it can dampen fluctuations, reduce redispatch costs and lower the need for emission-intensive residual power plants.

The positive news is that the expansion of battery storage facilities appears to be gaining momentum: commitments have already been made for at least 46 GWh of storage capacity.[2] At the same time, the feed-in tariff guaranteed to private households by the state has not yet been made dynamic. This means that while the first (few) consumers with dynamic electricity tariffs can already benefit from electricity exchange prices, electricity fed into the grid continues to be remunerated according to the rules of fixed state pricing, even if the feed-in tariff can be reduced, at least in part. The state is thus still setting price limits that undermine key market incentives. A feed-in tariff that is more closely aligned with the electricity exchange price would, among other things, make storage investments more attractive, stabilise the electricity system as a whole and potentially have a downward effect on electricity prices and the need for residual power plants.

Other figures can be found here.