2025 SDAC Market Watch

The Single Day-Ahead Market Coupling (SDAC) is the largest coupled electricity market area, and its price keeps providing the most robust price signal in Europe. Analysing SDAC is essential because day-ahead prices signal short-term supply-demand balance, inform trading and hedging decisions, and guide operational and investment choices across interconnected European power systems. 

2025 SDAC Market Watch

In this annual edition, we analyse the latest outcomes, trends and indicators as compared to 2023 and 2024, including:

• Day-ahead price developments across the entire SDAC area and the fundamentals driving them 
• Price convergence levels across Capacity Calculation Regions
• Occurrence of negative prices and reasons for year-on-year changes
• Tendencies in net positions of individual bidding zones
• Generation mix compared to zonal demand
• The impacts of allocation and network constraints on price convergence 

Key Insights

Average SDAC prices in 2025 have surged again after a decrease in 2024, only 9 bidding zones had slightly lower prices in 2025 compared to 2024. This price increase was mainly driven by a large spike during the first three months of 2025, while prices stabilised later on and were lower on average during the last quarter. The behaviour of the average SDAC price throughout 2025 is very similar to that of the natural gas price. In terms of generation, interestingly, highest share of the generation mix in the largest number of EU Member States came from nuclear energy.

Despite comparable negative price frequencies for Core, Nordic and SWE CCRs in 2024-2025, the average negative prices varied significantly, from -1.5 €/MWh in SWE to -13.5 €/MWh in Core. Within Nordic CCR, negative price frequency varies considerably across bidding zones, but the average negative price remains relatively consistent. Core CCR shows substantial variation in both metrics, with CEE bidding zones experiencing less frequent but more deeply negative prices, while CWE saw more frequent occurrences of smaller magnitude.

The impact of Polish allocation constraints keeps decreasing. In 2025, it limited SDAC on ~20% of MTUs, compared to 26% in 2024 and 32% in 2023.

In 2025, over two-thirds of the shadow price in Core CCR was accumulated by internal network elements. Only one of the top-5 most constraining critical elements was cross-zonal, with all five located in the southern part of Central-Western Europe and together accounting for 40% of the accumulated shadow price. While most of these elements show seasonal patterns (constraining the market only for a few months), Creys– St. Vulbas2 limited SDAC throughout the year, except for March.

Deep-dive further into the SDAC Market Watch

As we navigate the complexities of the day-ahead market in 2025, this Market Watch aims to provide stakeholders with valuable insights, enabling them to stay ahead in an ever-evolving electricity market and system environment.