Spain's capacity market is law, and still empty

Friday, Eight in the Evening

In the hour from 20:00 on Friday 18 September 2026, the Spanish zone's day-ahead price averaged 202.96 €/MWh. From 13:45 to 16:30 that afternoon the same auction had cleared at exactly zero, eleven quarter-hours in a row.

That Friday was the first day of Spain's capacity market. Orden TED/966/2026, signed on 15 September by the minister for the ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, and published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on the 17th, took force on the 18th. It creates a market that will pay generators, storage and consumers a fixed sum per megawatt per year for being available when the peninsular system runs short. The European Commission cleared it under state-aid rules in May, at about €900 million a year and €9 billion over ten years. The pv magazine headline read "Spain launches capacity market". What took force was a rulebook. By 29 September no auction had been called, no volume or price had been set and no megawatt had been contracted. Transitional auctions buy one calendar year of service at a time, so delivery starts in 2027 at the earliest.

The economic case for the market sits in the order's own preamble, and it is an argument about money. The ministry concedes that arbitrage revenues have been rising with the volatility of the markets, then argues that a "missing money" problem still blocks investment in firm and flexible plant. The summer of 2026 put that sentence to a harder test than any summer since at least 2022. From 1 to 29 September the Spanish zone's daily spread, the highest hour of the day minus the lowest, averaged 217.26 €/MWh, the widest month since at least January 2022. Evenings averaged 199.96 €/MWh and middays 29.07.