What if European wholesale electricity prices surpass EUR 500 per MWh in a cold snap?
Gas-set marginal pricing drives wholesale electricity prices above EUR500/MWh during a cold, low-wind spell, replaying 2022 power-market stress and squeezing households and industry.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Gas-set marginal pricing drives wholesale electricity prices above EUR500/MWh during a cold, low-wind spell, replaying 2022 power-market stress and squeezing households and industry. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · European energy ▲ · Industrial demand ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.