Trondheim: The European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators has published the 2026 edition of its annual Market Monitoring Report, the statutory exercise that pulls together one snapshot of how wholesale and retail electricity and gas markets are behaving across the bloc, and the headline number is that renewable generation now accounts for 50 percent of total EU electricity generation. The figure marks the first time the renewable share has crossed the half-mark, with solar photovoltaic generation alone adding 41 terawatt hours of incremental output compared with 2024.
Wholesale prices continued the structural decline that began after the 2022 energy crisis peak, but the report flags a competitiveness gap that has resisted narrowing. Both gas and electricity prices remain structurally higher than equivalent benchmarks in the United States, a differential that ACER attributes to a combination of higher LNG import dependency, lower indigenous fossil production and persistent scarcity pricing during the residual hours when thermal capacity sets the marginal cost. Household-level prices have also remained sticky on the downside, with retail bills still incorporating fixed network charges and policy levies that lag the wholesale movement.
On capacity remuneration, the Agency has signalled that ENTSO for Electricity will progressively integrate the amended European Resource Adequacy Assessment methodology into its forward outlooks, starting with the 2026 ERAA edition due in the autumn. The amended methodology introduces capacity mechanism parameters into the central economic viability test that governs whether national capacity payments can qualify for the targeted derogation under Article 22 of the electricity regulation. ACER’s intent, set out in a dedicated chapter of the monitoring report, is to push capacity remuneration design toward convergence across borders so that the price signal for new firm capacity does not collapse into a fragmented national subsidy race.
The retail monitoring strand of the report, co-published with the Council of European Energy Regulators, focuses on what the two agencies describe as the next phase of the consumer empowerment agenda, namely the use of dynamic and flexible retail contracts that allow households to shift load in response to wholesale price signals. Uptake remains low, with dynamic price contracts representing well under five percent of the residential book in most jurisdictions, but the regulators point to early evidence from Norway and the Netherlands that smart meter rollouts paired with simplified switching frameworks can lift penetration into the double digits within three years.
For DG ENER, the monitoring report feeds directly into the legislative pipeline around the Affordable Energy Plan that the Commission published earlier in the year. The ACER findings on retail stickiness and on the wholesale to retail transmission gap will shape the Commission’s evidence base for the network tariff reform communication that is pencilled in for the second half of the year, while the capacity remuneration chapter will feed into the Council’s discussion on the wider market design follow-up. Member State regulators have welcomed the renewable share milestone but cautioned that the gap between the share of generation and the share of energy consumption that is met by renewable sources remains material, particularly in heating and industrial process heat where electrification is moving slower than the power-sector trend lines might suggest. ACER’s next data drop, the supply outlook update, is scheduled for July.
