LevelTen Energy’s Q3 2026 European PPA Price Index Report is now available for subscribers.
Highlights of this quarter’s report include:
Slight solar rebound halts decline
Solar prices showed a slight uptick of 0.4% on this quarter’s Continental Index, which registered at 0.86. This index figure means that European solar prices are, in aggregate, at 86% of their Q3 2024 level – the same range they occupied in Q3 2025, after a steep decline of around 13% during the 12 months prior.
A spectrum of drivers are behind this plateau. Macroeconomic factors such as rising PV-module prices and higher interest rates are pushing up development costs for solar projects. Meanwhile, many developers in solar-heavy markets, such as Spain, have simply hit the limits of pricing lower while still retaining financeability. These players are moving into hybrid deals to move the market forward and restore project economics.
Moreover, elevated gas prices caused by conflict in the Middle East have lifted forward curves, particularly in more gas-linked markets such as Denmark, Poland, and Germany. In Finland, fewer negative-price hours and higher realised capture rates are feeding into rising solar prices.
The European-wide outlook masks considerable nuance at the individual market level. While Finland’s solar prices jumped significantly this quarter, Sweden’s declined. Denmark held steady, as Spain and Italy edged even lower. The market-specific drivers behind these shifts are explored in depth in the regional sections of the report.
Wind prices nudge upwards
Wind prices rose by 0.6% on this quarter’s Continental Index, reaching an index figure of 0.99 – 99% of their Q3 2024 price level.
Wind’s price path has differed sharply from solar’s over the past year. Both fell through the first half of 2025, but wind then recovered steadily through late 2025 and the first half of 2026, while solar stayed flat. Several factors explain the recovery.
Buyers value wind’s higher capture rates as solar cannibalisation deepens, and wind’s evening and night-time output makes it a natural complement to solar-heavy portfolios. Meanwhile, heightened demand for shaped and baseload products makes wind, with its steadier output profile, attractive.
At a more granular level, the picture is mixed across markets. Italian wind rose significantly in Q3 while Finland, Europe’s deepest and lowest-priced wind market, fell as wind cannibalisation there continues to bite. Several markets also returned to the Wind Index this quarter, including Spain, France and Sweden.
Hybrid PPAs gain ground across Europe
Nine markets hosted hybrid offers this quarter, with five of them passing the anonymity thresholds required to post a P25 price. Developers are increasingly turning to hybrid structures to meet offtakers’ demand for products that mitigate cannibalisation risk.
On our Continental Index, hybrid stands at 0.94 this quarter, down about 3% on Q2. It is now around 15% below its Q4 2025 peak and roughly 6% below where it stood when we began tracking hybrid prices in Q2 2025. Like-for-like, the trend is mostly downward. Hybrid prices in Germany and Finland fell this quarter as Spanish hybrid prices rose. While solar prices have plateaued, broadly speaking, hybrid prices continue to fall. The cost of adding storage to a PPA is coming down, though the premium over standalone solar still varies widely between markets.
Spain and Portugal together account for nearly half of all hybrid offers, with every Portuguese offer this quarter tied to multi-technology projects. Meanwhile, the Nordic and Baltic markets host more than 40% of the continent’s hybrid offers, a sign that storage is gaining ground well beyond Europe’s most solar-saturated markets.
In Germany, hybrid deals are now the main route for solar to reach corporate buyers.
Operational assets move into the spotlight
For the first time, LevelTen’s Index includes operational projects alongside new-build ones. The change reflects a real-world shift in LevelTen’s database.
Operational projects now make up almost 40% of all standalone offers on the LevelTen Energy Platform, and nearly 60% of wind offers. In Spain, operational assets now account for most of the country’s solar offers as new-build solar projects struggle to achieve viable project economics.
At LevelTen, we have been tracking operational versus pre-operational project offers for some time, and see a general convergence in price points as more buyers require speed of deployment or immediate availability.
The price points of operational offers do not consistently track higher or lower than those tied to pre-operational projects. Depending on the region and moment, operational bids can be above (like Sweden this quarter) or below (like Finland this quarter) their pre-operational equivalents. Among the spectrum of variables endemic to a PPA – contract start date, tenor length, negative price treatment – the difference between operational and pre-operational pricing falls well within the expected margin, making the two products usefully comparable.
Explore these topics at length by downloading your copy of the report today.
