Austria's Hydro, Europe's Weather: National Choices in an Interconnected Market | Ksenia Tolstrup, Magnus Energy

So, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I will keep fairly brief. And after that, we will look at some of the regional and national factors in the balancing market, something that we haven't touched upon yet, and also security of supply or resource adequacy aspect of the Austrian sector development. And then, since I would imagine there are quite a few market parties present in this room, I will also look into a couple of things to watch out for in the future. So, first, first things first, let's look at where we are standing in Austria. So, indeed, we are very, very renewable, have largely dependent on both pumps hydro and run of river, as well as a higher share of other renewable sources that is projected to grow significantly, according to our integrated network development plan between 2030 and 2040. Now, what is striking maybe is that the thermal share remains more or less the same. I think for those who are not from Austria, it's also important to know that we don't have any coal. The last piece of coal, if I remember right, was put in a museum by our back then minister right before the energy crisis as a relic. We don't have nuclear, as someone correctly pointed out. Indeed, it's a museum, and I don't think it will ever be restarted because it's actually technically not possible to restart it. What do we have? Well, we have CHPs and we have four gigawatt installed of gas. And that gas is very busy, as I will tell you later. What is expected in the future? Well, thermal remains more or less the same if it goes down, whereas other renewables are really taking the front stage, at least according to the projections slash expectations by the political side of the country, which is an important asterisk to this whole story and the growth that you see, because this is not necessarily that I'm saying the market will deliver that, very far from that. And that's actually the big question. Who will deliver on this promise and whether they really would, particularly considering that, indeed, solar has been increasing quite a bit, but wind has been declining. Now, what is also interesting to see here is that the overall electrification is expected to proceed and almost double by 2040, again, by the same projections. Now, let's look a little bit at the other types of technologies that we can think of. As maybe some of you know, we do actually have quite a bit of storage. By my latest information, we have about 2.2 gigawatt hours. However, this is all behind the meter storage. Small scale. That has nothing to do with utility one that can actually be used for system flexibility. So this is generally the storage that is used for consumers for maximizing their own self-consumption. And what is important is that the reason why it is there was the relatively favorable subsidy conditions and incentives in Austria that facilitated this boom. And the boom was augmented by the energy crisis where everybody said, well, I have to be a little bit more autonomous. I would like to be in my own little house. I want to be fairly autonomous from all the madness that is happening out there. Now, the bad news for those in their own little house is that it is next to impossible in a country like Austria to be isolated from others, and we are not a microgrid. What else can I tell you about the mix? What I can tell you is also the hydrogen story. Back in the day, a couple of years ago, it was a big boom. Well, now there is no boom. There is one bubble that burst. It also burst here. And by my latest information, we have about 30 megawatts of electrolyzer capacity by Ohm-Fo. And that is about that. However, if you look at our Önip plan, which is what you see on this graph, they will tell you what we will have up to 6 terawatt hours of electrolyzer consumption by 2040. Well, I personally very seriously doubt this number. Not sure about you. But the question is then, if the demand is going to increase by almost 100% in the next 15 years, how are we going to cover all that? Well, I think before we can answer that, it is good to understand how have we been covering it so far. But before that, let us take a closer look at this wonderful country with lots of ricks and rivers and the national anthem goes. What are the actual things that will be driving Austria's future? And I have not listed the factors, by the way, in any specific degree of priority. But climate change is one of them. And I'm very thankful to Mark for having delivered an excellent presentation on the expected effects. Also, in technological costs. Of course, if the batteries are increasingly as cheap as they are getting these days, well, maybe it is finally time to look at those batteries. Then we have geopolitical risks that, of course, Austria, even not a member of NATO, still exposed to, at least from the gas perspective, as you will also see on the next slides. We're also looking at the, let's say, evolution of our flexibility potential and flexibility needs in Austria that can no longer be covered by our beautiful pumped hydro alone. We're looking at the one really big factor, and it's becoming particularly big at our neighbors, but it will also come here, and that is the pace of TSO and DSO grid expansion. AI, I don't think I need to tell anybody about AI here. We all live it. We're all in it. And it is definitely going, its use is going to increase. Data centers are going to come, or they are already coming. And infrastructure risks are there, including IT infrastructure risks. And finally, last but not least, definitely not in the order of priority, national regulation. Particularly now that we finally, finally, finally, hallelujah, we have our LVG now approved in December 2025. But once again, as I said, Austria is not really an island, and frankly, we're a fairly small country in a very interconnected world. Very, very interconnected world that is interconnected both infrastructure-wise and market-wise. So now you have all that plethora of effects that Austria is exposed to multiplied by at least 27. Plus impacts of EU regulation on top, because as you probably know, it is not only the national regulation that tells you a lot about how the sector is shaped, but the EU level in Brussels. So now let's zoom in. I'm going to skip this slide, basically, because you've already seen and heard it 10,000 times today. But indeed, we are now in, again, once again, uncharted waters. Once again, congratulations, people, we broke yet another record. Yeah? And our run-off river generation has been very low, historically low, apparently since 1955. So it was not, as by some presenter was said, the last 15 years was actually more like 30 years or more. Exactly. But let's also look at the region, because once again, Austria is not an island. And the Danube is not only Austria's, unfortunately. And in fact, quite a few countries have been affected by the water levels in the Danube. And indeed, there have been some pictures of people walking their dogs on the Danube riverbed, which may look funny, but it's actually very sad. And you can see that it is really in the overall region that the water levels, so if you see on the left-hand side, the water levels have been extremely low and below the historical levels. But there may be something that you are less aware of. In Austria, we've actually been in a fairly good situation compared to the neighbors down the stream. If you have water shortages, you don't want to be down the stream. Yeah? You want to be out the stream. And luckily for us, at least, what really matters for a run of river is not even as much how much water there is, but also the differential in that water flow. And we're lucky to be on the side of the Danube that is actually fairly inclined. So we can actually profit from that water level differential even though the overall water volumes are lower. This is not something that our Hungarian, Slovakian colleagues can be too happy about because there, Danube gets pretty flat. And that's a problem. And that's how that PAC nuclear power plant was affected. So for once in Austria, we're actually happy we don't have nuclear. But anyway, so you can see that this has been a common regional issue. And of course, it had an impact on the day-ahead electricity prices. Who would be surprised? But what is also interesting is that in the end, I double-checked, and it turns out that in June in Austria, we were actually suddenly a net exporter by quite a big margin. There the story gets murky. Why? Because on the one hand side, we exported a lot to Germany, mostly. A lot of renewables that actually compensated for the shortfall of hydro. But then what happened in the end? In the end, we lost in the same month over 10 terawatt hours of generation of Randall River hydro. Does anybody know where it went? What happened to it? Exactly. Redispatch. Redispatch. Because what we do have a lot of, besides water, is congestion. We have a lot of congestion. And if you think about it from the, to put it in perspective, if we think about 2025 alone, redispatch happened on 215 days of the whole year, which translates into about 60% of all days of the year you have redispatch. Redispatch. This is a big issue that, of course, has nothing to do, well, it has something to do with the market, but since redispatch is something that happens after the market closes, you can see that in the end, what is, what the market tells you, versus what the actual consumption is, are two very different things. And getting back to this graph, once again, yes, we have a lot of renewables. Yes, we produced, we compensated a lot with the intermittent renewables. However, our prices are so, so super high. And they're actually the higher than the max range that you can see here of the previous, how many years did we take from 2021? But we removed 2022 in order not to secure the results. It's quite a big change. I do still remember when the average prices, somebody mentioned before, were about like 40 to 60 euro per megawatt hour was normal price. Well, that story is over a long time ago. And so now we're again very, very far from that. What is, however, what is not shown here, however, is that also similar to other countries, we do have a lot of hours with negative prices. So last year we had, I think, 300 something. Yeah? This is also new. And the reason for those high prices is still, we still have those four gigawatts of gas. And we still are mostly a net importer. So right now we cannot fully rely on our own generation in Austria, even though we are beautifully renewable. And that is one more proof of that, to put some numbers and figures to my words. This is the outcome of 2025. I already mentioned to you that in June we were exporting, indeed, more than we were importing. But that was the first month after the preceding six months when we were net importing. So June was the only one we were exported. And what you see here is also a fairly common tendency that we are importing a lot from Germany and Czechia, sometimes also from our neighbors in Switzerland. And then we are also exporting further out to Italy, Slovenia and Hungary. What does that show again? That Austria is a highly, highly interconnected and small country, which means that we are a transit country. And we're a transit country for pretty much everything, from logistics to gas to oil to electricity. And that means that it can also happen, speaking about those 10 terawatt hours of redispatch, that we are also influenced by our neighbors and the power flows in our neighbors, producing at least some of that congestion that we're experiencing here internally. I really love this graph, not because it has a lot of data, but actually because it's so clear as to how much we have historically been on the importing end. This is actually, when I saw that, I think it's pretty mad, particularly looking at the volumes of imports that we have. This is pretty big. And as you can see, in 2023, we were really there on the cusp. In 2024, we had a really wet year, and so we were exporting like crazy, but then it was soon over again. Now, that's not where the story ends. As I keep saying over and over again, Austria is not an island, and so what that also means is that we are highly integrated in all the electricity markets in Europe in all market timeframes. Something I think that we can really be proud of, at least because we've always been very much at the forefront of that market integration. Yeah? Like before piggybacking on the four German TSOs when we still used to be the same bidding zone, and after that, in our own capacity. And this is why we are involved, of course, in the long-term transmission rights allocation and balancing capacity procurement, also now with a new kid on the block, Alpaca, which is, well, not really an animal and not really a market, but at least a common way of procuring or allocating capacity for AFRA, SDAC, SIDC, and, of course, all the balancing market corporations for balancing energy. And this is something that I would like to pay special attention to because, I mean, day-head and intraday by now are a little bit boring, so let's look at balancing, my favorite topic. So what's happening in balancing? One thing that's happening in balancing is that, once again, Austria is cooperating a lot with its neighbors in a much broader region who form part of so-called FCR cooperation. So unlike Mario and Picasso, who hopefully you already heard about, this is a voluntary cooperation that everybody, any TSO, can potentially join. Yeah, and Austria is part of it, and what you can see here is that all these countries, except for Czechia, which is red, they have been part of this FCR cooperation for quite a while. Czechia was new, and what you can see here is it joined around here, mid-July. It completely wreaked havoc on its FCR market because it was not really a market before, so they really experienced quite a shock. But after that, now, the good news is that ever since 2025, prices really have been stabilizing in 2026, those beautifully, beautifully correlated FCR prices. So this is already where Austria is playing a big role. However, an interesting question to all of you, because I don't think it's so widely known. Do you have an idea which of these countries is the biggest producer or provider of FCR to the entire continental Europe? Any hunch? Any French in the room? One? Well, you can be proud of yourself. Well, not of yourself, but of your country, because French has extremely flexible nuclear, funnily enough. Not something that other nuclear power plants can brag about, but the French can, and thanks to their really flexible technology, they are supplying the bulk of FCR in entire FCR cooperation, which is most of continental Europe, which I think is quite noteworthy. So also we in Austria are actually profiting from that FCR for nuclear. Now, another thing, something that I very much like dispelling recently is the statements from some corners saying, well, renewables are bad renewables, they are wreaking havoc on our system balance. Well, that's not the case. And I would very much like to put this debate to peace, because this is really not the case, and I showed this example of Austria and compared it to Belgium. Why? Because we're a similar size, and at the same time, we have the increase in renewables in relative terms has been very, very similar, around 75%. And so there is no strict correlation between massive increase in intermittent renewables and worse system imbalances. You can see a very similar picture for Germany as well. Being a much bigger country, we see the same picture. There is the same type of analysis in Denmark, for example, showing exactly the same thing, even though Denmark has 65% installed capacity of wind alone. And this is why I would really like to put this out here, because I find it important to highlight. What else would I like to highlight from the balancing markets? What I also would like to highlight from the balancing markets is that, again, Austria is part of multiple corporations, including procurement of EFRR cross-border, especially with Germany, our standing, loving relationship for which we lovingly allocated about 80 megawatt of horizontal capacity to exchange EFRR, and that now was joined also by Czechia through this new cooperation with the lovely name, myopaka. As you can see also here, for EFRR capacity, the prices have also been converging all the time, and my bet would be that they will continue converging going forward. However, what is less known, and what I find quite interesting, remember how I told you that Austria imports from Germany, Czechia, and other countries a lot? Well, the interesting thing is that when you look at EFRR, the picture is very different. There, suddenly, we are contributing a lot to Germany. So all those blue or teal bars that you see are actually us, in our beautiful hydro, providing EFRR for Germany at night, exactly when the renewables or other renewables shut down. With a few minor exceptions, particularly around the energy crisis, but everybody was kind of in a chaos mode, but fundamentally, we do tend to export a lot and use up those 80 allocated megawatt. So by the time that allocation, that strict allocation of capacities is gone, Germans are going to be crying more than the Austrians. So much to balancing. Let me share with you one last aspect connected to the integration of the European markets, and that is capacity markets. I still remember the time when capacity markets, hopefully everybody knows what capacity markets are. I'm not talking about balancing capacity. I'm talking about capacity markets, which are auctions to secure firm capacity in times of scarcity. Yeah? So back in the day, those were a taboo word. If you have a capacity market, don't tell anybody about it. Now you can. And now you can be fairly vocal about it. Why? Well, I would say, at least my bet would be that the energy crisis really shifted the political needle there. It really fired up a lot of the old discussions, and everybody started looking into their own energy mixes and reserves, saying, can we actually preserve resource adequacy or security of supply in our country? And what this map shows you is that in just the last, I want to say, two or three years, this picture changed dramatically. And what you see is that Austria remains one of the bulwarks of the energy-only market. And most of its neighbors already have capacity markets or they are planning to implement them. So we have Italy, who has had capacity market for quite a while. We have the new one, very recent. In July, capacity market was approved in Czechia, very new. Also, the French decided to continue their capacity market but change it to a centralized design. Poland received a prorogation of its existing capacity markets. Spain applied for one and it was approved exactly this year. Also, the Netherlands was very new. Capacity market introduced or will be introduced in 2026. Germany, once again, was also a bulwark of energy-only markets. Well, this is no longer the case because now with the new Kraftwerkstrategie and with the future capacity market planning, this is something that will take some time and a couple of more lawsuits, but it will be there. Now, the question is with all this, what's going to happen to Austria? Oh yeah, well, the Nordics are also thinking about it just for the completeness of the picture. Why is that an important question? Because being a small country, you always have two roots. Either you say, well, my own security of supply is super-duper important and I'm fine with my consumers paying for it or I'm saying, well, I'm so small that I'm definitely going to get something from somebody else. At the same time, there is another interesting aspect to these capacity markets and that is the requirements that are put on capacity markets in the EU regulation. What does it say? It says that a capacity market must allow cross-border participation. What does it mean? It means that if I'm verbund, just saying verbund for, it's not a commercial placement or anything, if I'm verbund and I have my power plant here, I might as well participate in a capacity market here, here, or maybe here under different conditions. And if something goes south in Austria, what's going to happen to the plant? And what kind of incentives we're creating when all of those different countries have their different capacity market designs? If you know the answer, please talk to me because I don't know one. Why does that matter? Well, because resource adequacy is also not an island. As weather is not an island, climate change is not an island. What that means is that when scarcity happens, well, the bad news is that it's going to be regional. It's not going to hit us because exactly we're a small country. And so, if you look at the era results, an era for those who are not or are less familiar with our beautiful electricity sector abbreviation soup is European resource adequacy assessment. Granted, this is the 2023 era, but I highly doubted that anything changed substantially recently. Look at this correlation map. What this correlation map shows you is that when we have expected scarcity in Austria, with 100% probability that scarcity is also going to happen to Czechia. So, goodbye import from Czechia. Same with Germany, 99%. I think we can be fairly sure. And, surprise, surprise, these are exactly the two countries we tend to import from. Yeah? And it really reminds me of back in the day in the conferences that I used to attend, there would be some modelers presenting another supermodel that they had, and then they're saying, yeah, and whatever is missing, we're just going to import it. And then I hear it in the third presentation, I'm like, who are you going to import from? And, well, I do not know the answer because we're definitely not going to be importing from the usual suspects. And since I see those two gentlemen already standing up, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what you have to watch in the future. And, of course, nationally we see our usual national mix, we see our Austrian capacity demand, we see our national prices, we also see Austrian available firm or flexible capacity, but the picture is much, much broader. And if you're not watching everything on the right hand side, you're definitely missing out on a lot of stuff. And that is, for example, the weather across all Central Europe, the needs, not just in Austria, but also in Germany, in Italy, what is happening to French nuclear, in the balancing market, look at the results of Marine Picasso, look how they are impacting your imbalance prices, look at the cross-zonal impacts, look at where the actual imports are coming from and what are the available cross-zonal capacities that determine a lot. Because in the end, interconnection is a great thing. And I will not tire of saying it, that in the energy crisis, we were lucky to be so interconnected. Because if you compare us to, for example, Texas, I'm not sure if you remember the situation with a cold snap in Texas, with their Ted Cruz launching somewhere in Mexico, while everybody was freezing, they are in energy island, we're not, and that really helped us through really hard times. But what that also means is that if something goes really wrong, we can have really bad domino effects. What else should you watch? Well, technology developments, clear, but also security of supply discussions, because this is not over. And then at the same time, not just the Austrian regulation, with a lot of things that will change and have changed with LVG, with the energy industry law, but also the updated network codes and guidelines on the U-level, because those ones are directly applicable to every country, and there's a whole new wave coming. So these are my key takeaways, and with that I'm wrapping up. What is with hydro? We love our hydro, and we have good reason to love our hydro. However, we need to finally come to terms with the fact that it's not any weather proof, and it will be affected by weather events, just like everything else. We cannot treat Austrian isolation, neither from the policy perspective, nor from the regulatory perspective, nor from a business strategy perspective. And then finally, national security is very national, but things can get very regional very fast, and this is why it is a big question for Austrian development is to how we are going to secure a resilient system while considering everything else that's happening around us with all the interconnected grids and markets. And with that, I thank you for your attention. Very fantastic, good presentation, Senja. Thank you for that. on point three there, you mentioned how Austria can be even more independent in some way, or national security supply, et cetera. When it comes to interconnection, are the authorities ready to invest, or how can things be solved? interconnection has already been addressed for quite a while, and we have a fairly ambitious grid action plan as well in Austria. However, as you can imagine, building a cable takes time. Surprise, surprise, it does. And that's why the difficulty is not that we cannot build a cable, but the difficulty is that the pace of change that is happening within the country and outside of its borders outpaces how fast you can build new infrastructure. And again, we're not just depending on our own infrastructure, we're also dependent a lot on the infrastructure built out in other countries, for example, in Germany. You will also take part in the panel later on to discuss also the grid connections. Christian? Yeah, thank you, Xenia. And with that, I would like to invite our next speaker onto the stage. But first of all, a small present to Xenia. So, here's a present from us. Thank you so much.