Did Low-Carbon Electricity Shield Countries from the Energy Price Shock?
Countries with higher shares of low-carbon electricity experienced smaller price increases after the 2022 energy crisis.
When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent European natural gas prices soaring in 2022, wholesale electricity prices followed. But the shock did not hit every country equally. Countries that had invested heavily in low-carbon generation – nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, and bioenergy – saw smaller and shorter-lived price increases than those still reliant on fossil fuels.
Using publicly available data from Ember and Our World in Data, we quantify the relationship between a country’s pre-crisis low-carbon electricity share and the size of its price increase.
The full interactive analysis includes:
- Monthly price time series for all European countries (with a country selector)
- Price change bar chart comparing 2019 to the average of 2023–2025
- Scatter plot with regression showing how low-carbon share relates to price changes
- Counterfactual analysis: what would prices have looked like if countries hadn’t expanded low-carbon generation between 2010 and 2019?
