Wholesale Electricity Prices in Ireland

The day-ahead price

Every day before 11am, generators and suppliers on the island of Ireland submit bids and offers to SEMOpx, the power exchange for the Single Electricity Market, for each hour of the following day. The auction matches them and publishes one clearing price per hour. That is the day-ahead price. It is the closest thing Ireland has to a spot price for electricity, and the daily average shown at the top of this page is simply the mean of those 24 hourly prices.

Suppliers such as Electric Ireland, Bord Gáis Energy, Energia and SSE Airtricity buy a large share of the power they sell to households through this auction and through contracts priced off it. So when the day-ahead price rises for a sustained period, their costs rise, and eventually so do the tariffs listed on our electricity providers pages.

Why Irish wholesale prices are among the highest in Europe

The price in any hour is set by the most expensive plant needed to meet demand. In Ireland that is almost always a gas-fired station, so the wholesale electricity price tracks the wholesale gas price plus the cost of carbon permits. Ireland also imports nearly all of its gas, sits at the end of the European pipeline network, and is an island with limited interconnection to Britain, with the Celtic Interconnector to France still bedding in. When the wind drops, there are fewer cheap alternatives to switch to than a country in the middle of the continental grid has, and prices spike.

On windy days the opposite happens. Wind can supply more than three quarters of demand, gas plants drop out of the price stack, and the day-ahead price can fall below €50/MWh or even below zero in the small hours. That swing is why the hourly view on the chart is so jagged, and why the annual average matters more than any single day.

How wholesale prices feed into your bill

The wholesale energy cost is only one part of a domestic unit rate. Network charges paid to ESB Networks and EirGrid, the PSO levy, supplier operating costs and margin, and VAT are all added on top. As a rough guide, the wholesale price is somewhere between a third and a half of the unit rate you pay, depending on where the market is.

There is also a long lag. Suppliers do not buy all their power at the day-ahead price on the day. They hedge, buying most of their expected demand months or even a year or two ahead at fixed prices, so that a bad week on the market does not bankrupt them. That is why retail tariffs kept rising through 2023 even as wholesale prices fell from their 2022 peak, and why tariff cuts arrive months after the market has eased. A falling 12-month average on this page is a leading indicator of cheaper tariffs, not a same-week promise.

Look at the hourly chart on a sunny, breezy spring or summer day and you will see the price sag between late morning and mid-afternoon, then jump for the evening peak around 5pm to 8pm. That midday dip is solar. Ireland now has well over a gigawatt of solar on rooftops and solar farms, and on bright days it displaces gas generation exactly when demand is moderate. In the last 12 months the day-ahead price went negative in at least one hour on 4 days.

For a household with panels this cuts two ways. The electricity you use yourself is worth the full retail rate, so self-consumption is unaffected by the wholesale market. The surplus you export is paid at a supplier's Clean Export Guarantee rate, and those rates are loosely tied to the wholesale price at the times solar exports, which is precisely when it is lowest. Our microgeneration export rates guide compares every supplier's current rate.

The practical takeaway: as more solar arrives, midday wholesale prices will keep falling while evening prices stay high. A home battery that stores your surplus for the evening peak, or a smart tariff with cheap overnight and midday windows, captures that spread. Exporting everything at midday captures the least.