Austria's Power Price Outlook: Climate Change, International Conflict and Regulation | Sebastian Braun, ICIS

Thank you very much. Related to the last presentation, fun fact, do you know today is National Warning Day in Germany, so all mobile phones in Germany probably will ring this morning, hopefully it works, so it fits quite well to the presentation earlier. Very good presentation, thank you. My name is Sebastian Braun, I'm working for ICS. I started my career 2014 after I studied, and I remember I worked at EMBW in the trading, and the power price was below 30 euros per megawatt hour year base. It feels like ages ago, it's an age ago, but carbon prices were 5, 7 euros. Gas was anyway out of the money, nobody was talking about gas. We started the gas plant that EMBW owned at that time once a year just to check if it still works. Coal was in the money, completely different times now. The title of the presentation changed a bit because I jumped in went in so glad sent, I came home of canal seeaien O known 900ário and EVERYA. E外 HANA the gas price quiz, the low hydro levels. I don't name them now, but I want to put numbers behind this and understand what's the impact on the power prices in Austria. So how does it work? This is forward. Yes. So I already mentioned a bit what my plan is for today. Weather impacts, the low wind production in Europe, El Nino. Next topic will be regulation, the Italian energy, energy degree, the cross-border capacity. So topics from the regulation side that are relevant. The carbon price and finally also the gas price. And I think the gas price as the last point is also probably the most important one. So a slide that's kind of one, two months old, looking at the first half of the year. It already feels like a bit outdated, but I wanted to start with this, saying this is where I basically ended when I left the office six weeks ago. So now where's my... Oh, sorry, wrong direction. There's the pointer. So general to April. How does this year compare to last year? And we saw more wind generation, which was good. We're returning slowly to what's norm weather conditions, a norm weather wind production. Still below, but much better than last year. That's good. And what we also see is that demand picked up. So that's also... It was basically labbing out in the way. All the fossil and thermal generation slightly decreased. Then May, June, solar also came into the game. Wind not fully recovered, but still a bit better than last year. Demand is still good. And now we're seeing also the increased gas price led to fuel switch, and the wind production basically jumped in. Yeah. I think this is already the first sign of what's coming now next. So the weather impact going a bit more deeper into the low wind production and then in New York. This is from January 2016 to today, the wind production in Europe. Looks quite good until here. It's always up and down. And then we have over the last one and a half years, this downward trend, much lower wind production in Europe. Now the question is, what are the reasons for this? And will this stay? So four things we came up with. Crit curtailment, maybe economic curtailment could be an option. One wake effect, so we just put too much wind, they're shadowing each other, so wind production goes down. Three, aging turbines, they just get older. Maybe they're not that efficient anymore. Four, something really changed. The jet stream is blocking metrological changes. What do we think? There's the structural headwinds that I just mentioned. They definitely exist, but they're not able to explain this, that this will keep happening in the future. So what we think is, it's a cyclical event. It will not stay. There's no metrological long-term proof that wind will underperform in this extent for longer. So we lost 107 terawatt hours, but we think it will not stay forever. So it's a two-way risk. So if it's coming back, it will directly push power prices down. And obviously, we analyze this and want to give an impression, more or less wind production has a different impact on different markets. We usually look at the biggest markets, but I put Austria here as well because it's so important for this audience here. We did four scenarios. More wind, much more wind, a bit less wind, and a significant less wind, depending on load factors. And yeah, we spent a lot of thoughts into how we define them. What I want to say is, France and Spain are strongly impacted, basically the most impacted. And then we have the countries, Germany and Great Britain. They have even more downside potential. If the wind is coming back, it can directly take gas out of the merit order in these hours, and therefore we get much lower prices. Austria has a similar effect, just it's a bit limited because the cross-border connection, they not always get the cheap wind. I think this is also, I will cover this in a minute. Poland and Italy, they still have too much gas. Price setting is not, wind is not able to push the fossil fuels out of the market. Just, I put it here again, it's technically a two-side risk. That's really important to keep in mind. Could be less wind, could be more wind. All right. Hydro stocks, I just put a slide because I feel like to make it complete, but I know there's not a presentation coming, so I don't want to put too much effort into this. But you see, 2026 is below the last 10, 15 years. We have not seen this. It's a record low. That's tough for the markets, and this is also, since these are storages, it takes a while to refill them. So this has definitely an impact on the forward curve. Scandinavia is also not looking perfectly nice. Below average, and the Balkans also below average, even below last year, doesn't look very good. Very dry weather, could be also linked to El Nino. Yep. Forgetting the market out. Okay. So I think there's definitely a risk premium because of this in the market. Now we looked at El Nino. It's relatively small, but we put all the countries, just to show also that there's not a clear picture there for El Nino. We looked at Q3 2026, Q4 26, and Q1 2027. We had three El Ninos over the last years, and these are the years 2015-16, 2009-2010, and 97-98. So I promised you to quantify. Generally, and you knew it's related to more solar generation in Q3, lower hydro generation, and more solar production. And I would say this is what we see. We see a 43 years, slightly bearish impact on market prices. In Q2, this changes a bit. We saw two El Ninos that were bullish for market prices, and one El Nino bearish for market prices. So it's not a super clear picture, but usually, traditionally, El Nino means a mild start into the winter, slightly lower temperatures. Reservoirs tend to refill. There's more precipitation, and continuing low wind speeds. I think Q3 definitely fits, Q4 probably also. Now, going into Q1, and you see the scale changes, so there's a really lot of fluctuation. Also, I would say that's normal for winter contracts. I hope everyone can see this. Q1 tend to be slightly colder than normal years. If there's an El Nino, and it's a very strong El Nino, I think the market is preparing for this. So we ran our fundamental model with the weather year 2009 and 2010, and you will see really some markets at really high prices if we use the weather of these years. Yeah, so the reduced hydro stocks are definitely then a problem. Wind speeds tend to increase, and in Austria, we got an increase of about 12, nearly 12 euros per megawatt hour for the Q1 contract if the winter of 2010-11 would come back. Now, something also related to temperatures in El Nino. I plotted here, the last 2000, is it 82 to 2016, the demand of France, and you see there's a lot of fluctuations, and maybe the key story here is the swing is 35 terawatt hours. Sorry, this should be Q1, Q1, and Q4. Sorry, there's a wrong name in here. This was the El Nino effect, and what I wanted to say is, Austria has a power demand of about 40 terawatt hours for these two quarters, so the swing in France is about the same size as the overall power demand in Austria. So a cold winter can really, if France is like going crazy, and they have a really high power demand cold winter, this will have an impact on all Europe. Yeah, good. Then, just to remind us, where do we stand overall in terms of demand in Europe? We had a big crisis, we heard about this, the gas crisis, very, very high gas prices, I depicted this here. This was the year 2021, 2022, Ukraine invasion, we saw massive demand cuts, so demand dropped, so this is what you see here. This is the range of demand for the year 2017 to 2024. 25 was still really at the lower edge, although already recovered a bit. 2026 now looks already better, we see quite a good growth of demand nearly all European countries. Also, the economic growth seems to pick up a bit. I put some Oxford economics data here on the GDP growth, Austria, Germany, Italy, Germany leads in the first years, based on their picture, and then Austria is picking up with a bit more. I would say we're still at the lower range. I don't see a lot of downside potential, with the exception, if the gas price goes crazy, this can have a lot of demand destruction potential. Okay, jumping to the regulation impact. Sorry, I'm running through a bit the big impacts, but I think to try to give a picture of what's happening in the winter and next year, it's important to look at the different aspects. It's a poly, it's a poly crisis at the end. Regulation is not a crisis, I would say. Italian energy degree. This was the original proposal, but I still wanted to put it here because it's quite interesting what Italy plans to do. They wanted to do two things. One, the gas transportation tariff reimbursement, and second, ETS cost reimbursement. The first one, the gas reimbursement, the transport cost, we think it's quite likely that this will come. We include this also in our base case. You can see the impact on power prices. The PUN, that's the Italian power price, would go six to seven euros down. The PSV, the gas price in Italy, is slightly up, but not a big impact. Now, there's the second thing, the ETS reimbursement. We think it's very unlikely to come, and therefore, they also publish an update. This would have a massive impact, and therefore, we also think the EU would not allow this. It just would go against many rules. The timeline is, this does not need European approval. This needs, and therefore, they are here, and now they're thinking about different solutions. The different solutions are a kind of a cut of gas prices, similar to what we have seen on the Iberian Peninsula. There's a big difference. The Iberian Peninsula is not very connected. Italy is super good connected, so it's very interesting how they implement this. They suggest, A and B, two options, how to implement this in detail. I don't want to go there now. However, we also try to model this. It's not settled yet, what caps they want to use. We did these six model runs here with 30 euros cap, 35 euros, and 40 euros cap. Maybe starting with the 30 euros cap, this would be quite massive impact for the market. Cutting prices at 30 euros would impact nearly all hours of the year. The price impact would be this. So, 7, 8, 9 euros. I think it's quite unlikely that the EU would approve this. Then the next option would be 35 euros. The main impact would be in winter. So, winter prices would be cut. For the average base load price, 20, 27, it's probably a lot to digest, but, yeah, it's between 2 and 3 euros. And the last option would be the 40 euros per megawatt hour. This would be more like a security thing if there's future gas price shocks, kind of a safeguard. And this is the option we think is most likely. And the good thing is, or maybe the bad thing from a government perspective, Italian, the price impact is really low. And also put Austria here. The blue bars is Austria. The green is Italy. Nearly no price impact. Not sure if this is what I want to achieve and if they want to go for this because there's a lot of problems coming with this. I will skip this slice mostly. There's just one story here. It will make life more complex. You can't really rely on the futures prices anymore. These gaps will be recalibrated all the time. There's a lot of challenges coming with this. Also for us as modelers and model operators, this would make our life more difficult. For you traders, it also makes more difficult. Yeah, we see. The flows in all these cases, I think Switzerland would be the country mostly impacted. I showed Austria is kind of fine. I thought in the beginning maybe the big impact would be bigger. But Switzerland is the most critical one. Okay. Whereas the last model runs were very deep dive, very sophisticated, this is just a simplified one because I feel like it's also super important. Not so much is happening there on this front, in my opinion, on the grid development and the restrictions between Germany and Austria. Everyone knows both countries are part of the core flow-based market coupling system since 22. What we also have seen is that the flows actually dropped quite a bit since then. There's also another presentation on this, therefore keep it short. But actually, these power flows are really important and one thing that could solve it very quickly if Germany would basically implement a market split, I think it's not going to happen, although my Austrian friends would really like to see this. So I just did three scenarios, adding a bit more capacity, allowing a bit more capacity, and the price impact is really significant. So just that we keep this in mind, if we would have more flows, Austria would profit a lot, get lower prices, because there's a lot of cheap wind production in Germany. Now my last two quick ones. Carbon price. Carbon prices are also important. It's a key risk. I mentioned when I started 2014, carbon prices were at 5, 7 euros. Until the beginning of the year, the carbon price really went up. Everyone, a lot of people expected the prices to go nearly 100 euros. The marginal abatement cost would be basically the barrier. Then we had a massive drop because there was speculation on regulation. Then Chancellor Merz had this not so nice speech where he said we need to pause the EU ETS. That led to another crash of the market. Since then, the market has recovered. We are in the process of an EU reform. Also speculators, that's always a good indication, at least for me, what do all the speculators think and do. They left the market. Now they are rebuilding up their positions. We also see most speculators are still long. Five times more speculators are long in comparison to short, so they expect prices still to increase. Here, this is the trading volume and it's very muted at the moment. Everyone is waiting for some impulse from the European Union or what's coming out of the regulation. This is our carbon price forecast. We have three scenarios. Our base case is basically in this range of 84. I haven't checked the price this morning. Yesterday, it was 84 euros. We think slightly higher, 86 maybe. This is our base case. Very much in line with the market. The upper scenario, this is our high case, is current legislation. So if we don't change anything in legislation, it's quite likely the prices go up because the market situation, the fundamental situation, is still very, very tight. And we also see speculation. It's very bullish. It looks like that the industry is very careful and not buying because these things haven't been implemented yet. So it's all expectations of the future. And then we have our low case, which means all the regulation and the intervention is very strong. They are really giving free allocations and play around with a lot of things. I could go very much into detail, but that's probably for another day. We did obviously again model runs. The impact is strong on Poland. We would have expected this with so much coal production. But also Austria was a bit of a surprise to me that are really exposed to carbon prices as well as Germany. Very similar. And then it goes down Italy a bit more because of still a lot of gas and the price setting. And France obviously much less impacted by higher or low carbon prices. So these are model runs. The zero line is basically our base case and high and low used and then the delta of power prices. And 20 euros or here 15 euros, that's a big thing. Although the high case is quite unlikely. Did I cover everything? I think yes. If there's further questions, I'm happy to discuss this also in the breaks. I think there's a lot. So then gas prices, my last bit. Is it okay? Do I have two, three more minutes? Perfect. Also the most important one. So I don't want to skip this. So these are gas prices. We did modeling also with the straight of homes closed. And we think if the straight of homes would stay closed until end of the winter, the prices would be easily 10 euros higher. It's impressive how the curve still stays quite muted. But we also know in the long term, there's a lot of capacity coming from the US online. If there's a cold winter, that's maybe another one. It's easily another 10 euros. And then it's getting really interesting. We also saw a lot of fuel switch already. And what I always like to do is looking at poly market. What is the expectations at the moment? People betting money, so I trust this a bit. Just no return in 2026. 77% of the people say no return of the shipping traffic in the straight of homes in this year. I also checked this on the 3rd of June. That was an older presentation. There, 76 people were still expecting the street to open in 2026. So interesting to see this. What would be the price impact when we keep the straight of homes closed until the end of the winter? And then, by the way, it doesn't matter if it stays closed for the summer. It's the summer, demand is lower. These are the countries. Austria is this. 12 euro and 7 euros in Q1. You could argue that Q1 maybe should be higher also with El Nino. But this is the range we're talking about. I need to speed up. I skipped this one. Just a reminder that countries are differently correlated. My market outlook briefly. These are the prices we see for the countries Q4 and Q1. As I said a few weeks back the difference so, no, first start. The fundamental view I would say the market is overvaluated. There's a risk premium about 5 to 10 euros I would say. Now after the bull run of the last weeks I would say it's 10 to 30 euros the risk premium in the market. Different reasons. Poor hydro generation, the low average wind speeds, cold temperatures. But it's important these are two-sided risks. So if the temperatures are lower then it could also go in the other direction. So it's important to keep this in mind. Then we have the gas prices I would say by far the biggest risk. You could argue that the gas prices the risk of gas prices should be included in the gas prices and not the power market. Still people put risks on power markets. Open to discussion. To conclude I think the market is probably preparing for like the worst. Really a perfect storm. The fundamental view I would say is the market is slightly overvaluated or not slightly. It's 200 euros now in Italy. That's a lot. Good. This is our portfolio. I'm from ICS. I haven't said this in the beginning. We are data and service provider. We cover everything from carbon markets, gas markets, power markets have the different teams. So if there's questions let me know. I'm happy to connect with this. Thanks a lot. And thanks for the invitation. Always great to be here. Thank you for a very, very comprehensive presentation. Very interesting. all the factors that you presented and also when we saw the decline in wind power production in Europe. Yeah. How about Austria? Does Austria need more wind power? Need more wind power? Yeah. I think everyone needs more wind power because it's coming in winter and in winter prices are high so this is always very helpful to cut the prices push gas out of the merit order. In theory, yes. Yeah. So, but how about then permitting and the regulatory issues? Does it, is it improving to get permits for installing more wind power? So, I can't give you the details there. I think it's always a challenge. Permitting is a challenge. We'll probably get more information on this later. It's a challenge everywhere. Permitting. Nathan, Levitkop, Montel. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Thanks, Sebastian. Nathan here from Montel. So, you referred there briefly to the gradual rebuilding of speculative interest in carbon. we had the ETS reform package come out. It was much anticipated. You pointed there to the anticipation there, statements by people like Mouts saying, you know, we should put the whole thing on pause or at least it was misinterpreted perhaps that way. What do you think the return to the market of speculative capital means? Is this one of those sell the rumour by the fact type situations that the reform package overall is not in fact all that bearish? Yeah. It's a very good point. It's a very tough question. I hope everyone heard it. The speculative position is growing. I think it's always this. Basically, you basically buy when there's the rumour and then you sell when it's out. Still, I would say they're criticising probably if the EU is really able to work on the ETS in a way as it's currently priced in so that they still expect slightly price increase. But we also think that speculators will sell 85, 90 euros deposition. So they will not hold it until 100 euros. We see this as a policy upper class roof at the moment in the market. We don't think it will go in this direction. Christian? Are there any more questions from the audience? Nothing? Yes, one over here. Yep. Xenia? Thanks. Xenia, Tolstrop, Martin's Energy. Thanks a lot for this run for the entire European situation and the focus on Austria. Really interesting. Gives a good perspective. My question to you would be about one of the, I would call, non-intuitive results that I saw in your presentation. Maybe you have some thoughts as to why it is the case when you were comparing the impact of the ATS prices on the different countries. The impact on Austria was lower than the one for Italy. That really surprised me considering that Italy is highly, highly dependent on gas and has major supplies also or installed capacity of gas generation. How do you see the reason for that? Where does that impact come from? So, Austria is connected to a lot of countries, right? Also to Eastern Europe where we have more coal production, Germany coal production. And Italy has a lot of gas and gas is impacted by the carbon price. So, the model is really optimizing this. It has all the information. I would need to look into the specific details why it's like this, but they were relatively close together. Maybe I need to check again. Okay. Very good. I think we can close there, Christian. And thank you very much, Sebastian, for your contribution here today. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Over to you, Christian. Yes, we've seen that gas prices are still quite a big issue in Europe and in Austria as well, and carbon prices are an issue. Also, the obvious solution would be to electrify basically everything that we can, including the