GoKawiilIn the first four months of 2026, the average wholesale electricity price in Spain was €44 per megawatt-hour. In Italy, it was €127. In Germany, €96. In the UK, €103. Spain is now cheaper than France, well below the central-European bloc, and within striking distance of the Nordic hydro-and-nuclear heavyweights that have always topped the cheap-power league.
This is not where most observers expected Spain to be. A decade ago, Spain was a cautionary tale of stranded solar investment and one of Europe’s more expensive power markets. Today it sits near the bottom of the price table, and the gap is widening.
The story behind that ranking is, on its surface, simple. Spain increasingly pushed gas increasingly out of its electricity supply, and the price of electricity followed.
The mix has changed beyond recognition
Twenty-five years ago, a third of Spain’s electricity came from coal. Today, coal is effectively gone. Gas, which surged in the 2000s as the replacement, peaked above 30% of generation in the late 2000s and has since been pushed back to roughly 19%. Nuclear has held steady around 19%, hydro and bioenergy together around 14%, and the remaining capacity has been steadily filled by wind and solar.
Wind alone supplied 20% of Spanish generation in 2025. Solar, which barely existed at scale in the early 2010s, hit 22%. Between them, those two technologies now generate more electricity than any other single category in the system, including the nuclear fleet that was once Spain’s reliable workhorse.
2022 was the turning point
If you stack solar and wind against all fossil generation (gas plus the last embers of coal and oil), the lines crossed in 2022. That was the first year wind plus solar generated more electricity than every fossil source combined. Through the first quarter of 2026, the gap has widened further. Solar and wind delivered 44% of generation, fossil fuels 17%.
This is the structural story that many arguments about energy policy circle around. Spain did not just add renewables on top of a fossil base. It substituted. The fossil curve has been falling, year after year, while the renewable curve has been climbing.
2022 also a turning point for wholesale electricity prices in Spain: The Iberian exception capped electricity prices initially to below EU27 average prices but even after the mechanism ended Spain widened the price gap further.
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