The average price of a solar power purchase agreement (PPA) signed in Europe in the second quarter of 2026 reached €56.59/MWh (US$74.85/MWh), a 2.8% quarter-on-quarter increase.
This is the first time that the average PPA price in Europe has increased from one quarter to the next in a year, according to figures tracked by LevelTen Energy, which attributed this increase to “surging prices in Poland” and an increase in the price of solar PPAs signed in Germany, two countries that have been “disproportionately” impacted by higher wholesale power prices resulting from a restriction of the global gas supply.
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“Although the European average price for solar rose this quarter, individual market trends diverge significantly”, said Placido Ostos, director of European analytics at LevelTen Energy, who added that markets with “severe solar price cannibalisation” saw much lower prices last quarter.
“In markets with severe solar price cannibalisation, two things are occurring simultaneously. The first is immense competition between projects, amid solar oversupply that is causing price cannibalisation,” he said. “This leads to a second issue: solar PPAs face limited captured prices on the market, forcing developers to offer very low PPA strike prices to appeal to buyers. Both contribute to the downward price slide occurring in several markets.”
LevelTen identified France, Germany, Spain and Poland as all suffering from significant curtailment, each recording more negative price hours in the first half of 2026 than during all of 2025.
Solar PPA prices remain the lowest in Europe among the technologies tracked, with solar prices comparing to US$80.21/MWh for blended PPAs and US$95.86/MWh for wind PPAs. However, this quarter’s report tracks ‘hybrid’ PPAs for the first time, covering deals that include both renewable energy generation and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Average hybrid deal prices are a shade higher than blended PPAs—sitting at US$81.68/MWh—after falling from over US$90/MWh at the start of the year.
Batteries have often been touted as a way to minimise curtailment in countries, as they are cheaper and faster to deploy than large-scale grid infrastructure, and Spain and Germany both feature prominently in the hybrid tracker; 29% of European PPA offers recorded in the LevelTen price index for this quarter were from Spanish and German hybrid projects.
While there remains variation between solar PV and wind valuations within these hybrid structures—LevelTen’s figures show that hybrid PPAs are, on average, 24% higher than standalone solar PPAs but 15% lower than standalone wind PPAs—the company notes that hybrid deals “can deliver significantly higher settlement values”, increasing captured values by up to 80%.
North American solar PPA prices fall 4.8% quarter-on-quarter
Solar PPA prices experienced the opposite trend in North America, according to LevelTen’s figures, with average prices falling by 4.8% quarter-on-quarter, the first decline in two years. Solar PPA prices reached US$61.40/MWh in the market-averaged continental index, lower than the figures reported for blended (US$72.60/MWh) and wind (US$83.79/MWh), as has been the case since 2021.
As was the case in Europe, there was significant geographical variation within this overall trend. For instance, LevelTen reports a “steep quarterly drop” in solar PPA prices signed in the CAISO network in California, and without these figures, the market-averaged trend would have yielded a 1.8% quarter-on-quarter decline in solar PPA prices.
There is a slightly different trend in the continental index, which does not take into account the relative influence of each individual market, such as the CAISO grid. For this index, solar PPA price remains lower than that of wind or blended PPAs, but average wind prices leapt to US$61.19/MWh in the second quarter of this year, marking four consecutive quarters of sustained price increases that have taken wind from the cheapest of the three deal types in this index to the most expensive.
LevelTen also noted that the US policy landscape “remains extremely dynamic” for all technologies, pointing to the passage of the 4 July ‘safe harbour’ deadline as a significant milestone, as now new projects will not be able to access tax credits first introduced under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
This means that there will likely be fewer projects capable of signing PPAs at prices seen during the IRA tax credit era, which LevelTen expects will translate to either “uncharted territory” for US PPA prices, or an increase in average PPA prices.
