The role of geopolitical and climate risk in driving uncertainty in European electricity markets

This paper examines the occurrence of price bubbles in wholesale day-ahead electricity markets and investigates the impact of geopolitical and climate risk on such extreme price movements. The empirical analysis is executed for twelve major European electricity markets, namely APX (Netherlands), BPX (Belgium), EEX (Germany), EPX (United Kingdom), GME (Italy), NordPool (Finland, Norway and Sweden), OMEL (Portugal), OPCOM (Romania) and POWERNEXT (France). Our findings reveal that the probability of price bubbles increases with higher geopolitical risk and elevated air temperatures, while it decreases with greater precipitation and stronger wind speed. Specifically, a one-unit increase in geopolitical risk raises the probability of price explosiveness by 8.23%. These results underscore the urgent need for European countries to accelerate renewable energy deployment, enhance power system flexibility, and strengthen electricity market integration. Such measures are critical to achieving cli...