High electricity prices to drop in coming days
While electricity prices spiked at the beginning of the week, no similar price peaks are expected in the following days. Although the Sweden–Lithuania undersea cable is still out of service, wind energy will reduce prices.
Enefit's head of energy products, Sander Randver, told ERR the Lithuania-Sweden interconnection capacity Nordbalt will be off the market until Thursday, so the Baltic countries will be able to rely less on imported capacity during the morning and evening peak hours.
"However, compared to the beginning of the week, a slight increase in wind energy helps to smooth out extreme price peaks during morning and evening peak consumption hours. The annual maintenance of the Latvian cogeneration plant continues to have an effect," he added.
Randver noted that with the arrival of April, the ever-increasing production of solar energy will start to play a bigger role across the Baltics.
"This significantly lowers prices during the day but brings greater price fluctuations in the evenings, when solar production drops off and more expensive power plants need to be activated," he observed.
In April, prices are expected to be low in the day, but several times higher during peak morning and evening hours, Randver said.
Low wind, broken cables push prices higher
On Saturday morning, the 700-megawatt Nordbalt cable between Lithuania and Sweden failed. Due to a technical fault at a substation in Sweden, electricity was initially expected to be offline until Wednesday.
However, Sweden's electricity transmission system operator, Svenska kraftnät, said on Wednesday that repair work is still ongoing. Power is now expected to be restored on Thursday.
The outage significantly reduced the Baltic states' ability to import electricity from Scandinavia.
At the same time, the Finland–Estonia undersea cable Estlink 2 was also out of service, and maintenance work began at the Latvian cogeneration plant, scheduled to last two weeks.
On Monday and Tuesday, wind power output was also low due to weather conditions.
As a result of these combined factors, electricity prices at the beginning of the week peaked during the most expensive hours at over €700 per megawatt-hour.
On Wednesday and Thursday, however, prices normalized – on both days, the average electricity price was around €60 per megawatt-hour, though morning and evening hours still brought price spikes where prices multiplied.
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Editor: Valner Väino, Helen Wright
