In Finland this autumn, Google signed a 22-year, 507 MW power purchase agreement to extend the life of the Loviisa nuclear plant. The deal alone accounted for 41 percent of all PPA capacity contracted in Europe in September, and it points to where the market is heading, namely existing, operational assets that can deliver megawatt hours and guarantees of origin without waiting for a permit, a grid connection or a construction crew.
Buyers chasing value, not price, in Europe's PPA market
LevelTen Energy’s Q3 2026 EU PPA Price Index, the first to include offers from operational projects alongside new-build ones, now shows this shift in the data: operational assets account for just under two-fifths of standalone offers on its platform, and nearly three-fifths of wind offers. In Spain, operational projects now account for most of the country’s solar offers, as new-build economics suffer from rising module prices, higher interest rates and midday prices depressed by a glut of solar. “Operational assets naturally lower risk and bring fewer development hurdles and permitting delays compared to new-build projects,” said Plácido Ostos, Director of European Analytics at LevelTen Energy. For buyers whose priority is speed and price rather than additionality, he added, deals tied to operational projects can simply be more attractive.
A plateau for solar, a quiet recovery for wind
Headline prices in the Index moved little this quarter. European solar PPAs rose by 0.4 percent on the Continental Index to 0.86, which means prices are, in aggregate, at 86 percent of their Q3 2024 level. Wind rose by 0.6 percent to 0.99, almost exactly where it stood two years ago. Over the past year, however, the two technologies have gone separate ways. Both fell sharply in the first half of 2025, but while wind recovered steadily through late 2025 and the first half of 2026, solar stayed flat. Buyers are paying a premium for wind’s generation profile: its higher capture rates, its evening and night-time output, and its usefulness as a complement to solar-heavy portfolios. With demand for shaped and baseload products rising, a steadier generation profile is gaining in value.
The European average hides sharp differences between markets. Finnish solar jumped this quarter while Swedish solar fell, and while Danish solar held steady, Spain and Italy edged lower. On the wind side, Italy rose significantly, while Finland, Europe’s deepest and lowest-priced wind market, fell further as growing wind output continued to push down capture prices. Spain, France and Sweden all returned to the Wind Index this quarter.
Much of this is driven by gas prices, which pushed Pexapark’s EURO Composite up 5.0 percent in September, from €46.02 to €48.34 per MWh, with Great Britain up 10.9 percent, Italy and Poland both up 6.9 percent, and the Nordics up 4.3 percent. Only Iberia declined, with Spain down 3.5 percent. Elevated gas prices linked to conflict in the Middle East have lifted forward curves across gas-sensitive markets, and those gains are feeding through to PPA fair values.
Hybrid structures move into the mainstream
Alongside the shift to operational assets, hybrid PPAs are becoming a permanent part of the market. Nine markets posted a hybrid P25 price, the 25th percentile of offers, in the LevelTen Index this quarter, and five of them cleared the anonymity thresholds required to publish pricing. On the Continental Index, hybrid stands at 0.94, down about 3 percent on Q2 and roughly 15 percent below its Q4 2025 peak. Prices are likely to keep falling, as battery costs come down and lenders and offtakers increasingly treat new hybrid contract structures as bankable. Spain and Portugal together account for nearly half of all hybrid offers in Europe, while the Nordic and Baltic markets host more than 40 percent, a sign that storage is gaining ground well beyond the most solar-saturated systems.
Hybrid parks: why PV and wind rarely share a single connection
Germany is the clearest example. No standalone solar offers met the Index criteria this quarter, which means hybrid deals are now effectively the main route for solar to reach corporate buyers in Europe’s largest power market. The P25 of hybrid offers in Germany fell by 12.7 percent to €65.50 per MWh, the largest decline on the Hybrid Index.
“The case for hybrid PPAs in Germany is strong,” said Pieter van der Meulen, Country Manager for Germany at LevelTen Energy. “The country still needs a major expansion of solar to meet its 2030 renewable energy targets, but with high numbers of negative-price hours and rapid PV buildout, standalone solar is getting harder to finance. Pairing it with storage allows developers to move power output into the evening demand peak, and lets buyers sign a more predictable product with a shaped generation profile.” Historically low gas storage levels, van der Meulen added, strengthen the argument further. Every megawatt hour of solar delivered in the evening via battery storage is one less that depends on gas.
Industrial buyers take on storage
Pexapark’s September figures bear this out. Of 25 PPAs totalling around 1.2 GW of disclosed capacity, 21 came from corporate offtakers. There were three hybrid announcements in a single month, a new high that made Q3 2026 a record quarter for the format. Zelestra’s deal with German steelmaker Salzgitter is the strongest signal yet of industrial demand: the offtaker is buying the output of 147 MW of solar and controlling 79 MW/237 MWh of co-located batteries charged exclusively from those plants. Statkraft’s agreement with Wattmanufactur in Germany and Shell’s PPA with Abei Energy in Arcos de la Frontera, Spain, point in the same direction, with utilities and oil majors increasingly structuring deals that combine solar generation with storage optimisation.
Overstated battery availability puts investor returns at risk
Contracts that secure revenue for storage are spreading beyond PPAs. In September, 16 floor and tolling agreements were announced, covering roughly 2.1 GW (4.7 GWh), more than double August’s volume. Statkraft signed Poland’s first tolling agreement, a 10-year, 400 MW toll with Greenvolt, while Danske Commodities took a 400 MW floor on the Hunterston BESS in Great Britain, and Lithuania recorded its first announced floor agreement.
Comparing old and new projects
The Index’s two methodological changes, the inclusion of operational projects and the switch from a €/MWh continental average to an index baseline, themselves reflect how the market is changing. Operational offers were worth including because buyers increasingly treat them as comparable to new-build. Prices for the two product types do not consistently diverge: operational bids were above pre-operational equivalents in Sweden this quarter and below them in Finland and Spain, differences that fall within the normal range of any PPA negotiation.
When gas prices spike, batteries win and PPAs shrug
Four years after the 2022 gas shock, Europe’s corporate buyers still want protection against price swings. These days, however, a new wind farm, an operating solar park whose subsidy is running out and a solar-plus-storage package are all compared on the same terms. How much gas Europe has in storage this winter will have a big say in how busy the PPA market stays. (hcn)
