How Pricing Signals Impact Energy Resilience

Europe’s biggest energy security lever is hiding in plain sight. It’s called energy taxation 💶 In the first half of 2025, electricity taxes and levies were roughly twice as high as those applied to gas across EU Member States. This slows the energy transition and keeps Europe dependent on imported fossil fuels — and it’s the focus of my latest analysis for Strategic Perspectives. In some countries, the gap is striking. 🪙 Germany and Hungary tax electricity 3x more than gas. 🪙 Belgium? 6x more. 🪙 Croatia? 14x more. These price signals matter. When electricity carries higher taxes than fossil fuels, households are less likely to install heat pumps or buy electric vehicles. Industries are disincentivised to electrify their processes. At heart, fixing this is about energy security and affordability. With global tensions affecting energy prices, electrification offers a structural way out. And the quickest path to accelerate it is to rebalance our energy taxation.

How Pakistani consumer economics is quietly weaning the country off fossil fuels We talk a lot about breakthrough climate tech, yet many of the biggest shifts come from tools we already have: solar panels, inverters, batteries, simple software and clear price signals. Pakistan is a striking case study, it has become one of the fastest growing solar markets, now approaching 25% of utility-supplied electricity. Imports of solar equipment from China hit around 17 GW in 2024, five times the 2022 level! It is millions of households and businesses realising that cheap solar + storage beats expensive, dirty and unreliable grid power. The same shift appears in reverse for gas. LNG imports peaked at just over 1,100 million cubic feet per day in 2021 and have fallen each year since, even as energy demand has grown. Gas-fired power demand is down, and the government has started deferring and cancelling long-term LNG cargoes because plants simply do not need as much fuel. The drivers of this solar boom are straightforward. Energy tariffs kept rising while blackouts persisted, so people went looking for a way out. Low import duties made Chinese panels and inverters affordable. Net metering rules let users send surplus power back to the grid. Global cost declines in solar and batteries cut payback times to just a few years. Major floods in 2022 and 2025 also damaged or submerged several fossil-fuel power plants, refineries and pipelines, disrupting fuel supply and further reducing generation from fossil based-plants. Once those pieces were in place, any household or business could run the numbers, install rooftop solar, add batteries as prices fell, and steadily reduce reliance on the fossil-fuel grid, often increasing resilience to floods through distributed clean energy. As that pattern repeated across millions of users, plants that once looked essential began running fewer hours, and LNG cargoes they were meant to consume are being renegotiated or pushed out. Consumer economics is achieving what years of climate diplomacy and policy plans have struggled to deliver, bending the system toward cheaper, cleaner power. For founders, policymakers and investors, the lessons are clear. We do not need breakthrough technology, we need proven tech that is easy, cheap and low risk to adopt at scale, backed by practical policies on tariffs, import duties, net metering and grid rules. When price signals, reliability and convenience align, bottom-up change can move far faster than top-down plans. At Wavemaker Impact and Planet Rise we focus on this space, backing founders who accelerate deployment of tested greentech such as solar, storage, efficient cooling and productive-use equipment. Pakistan’s transition is not perfect, fossil fuels still dominate and the power sector’s finances are fragile, but it shows what happens when consumer incentives and climate goals line up, and boring old technology is allowed to scale.

Elering - Estonian TSO - is now bidding the full 250 MW of the state-backed Kiisa emergecy gas plant into Baltic FRR auctions—dropping daily system-service costs by roughly €1 million. Great for the April balance sheet. Yet the unintended consequence is a €170–200 per MWh price suppression that wipes out close to half the expected revenue stream for battery energy-storage systems, PV-plus-storage hybrids and demand-response aggregators—projects that anchor our clean-energy transition and grid resilience. If price signals stay muted until Kiisa’s planned 2028 divestment, we risk a flexibility gap and a far costlier scramble later. Policy suggestions: • Set a transparent cost-based bid floor for Kiisa. • Limit its cleared volume (e.g., 120 MW) to preserve contestable capacity. • Publish and honour a tapering schedule to 2028, giving investors certainty. Let’s align short-term affordability with long-term sustainability. #EnergyMarkets #StateAid #BatteryStorage #Renewables #BalticPower

Australia’s storage market is moving from price logic to system logic   Australia’s storage market is entering a structural turning point. Signals from Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) Tender 8 and Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s Q3 2025 Quarterly Energy Dynamics (QED) show the same shift: storage value is moving away from price volatility and towards system responsibility.     Tender 8 shows government is buying system resilience, not cheap MWh   CIS Tender 8 is a 4 GW / 16 GWh capacity tender. Policy design now embeds system value in evaluation:   - Increase hosting capacity - Strengthen system stability - Provide voltage support - Deploy grid-forming (GFM) capability - Enable aggregated project models   Government focus is not on “cheap storage”. Government focus is on closing resilience gaps in the power system.   This shift signals a new investment logic for the National Electricity Market (NEM). Capacity roles are becoming more institutionalised and less tied to short-term volatility.       QED data shows rapidly shrinking price spreads and rising system-service duties for storage   QED for Q3 2025 provides supporting evidence. Evening battery discharge increased 177% year-on-year. Exposure to very high price intervals dropped, and cap returns fell to 28 AUD/MWh, an 82% decline.   Storage assets are taking on more peak management responsibility while finding it harder to rely on arbitrage for returns. Storage is moving from “price taker” to “system carrier”.     Storage players now face a bifurcating industry landscape   Policy signals and market outcomes are driving rapid differentiation:   - Projects that rely mainly on price spreads face shrinking profitability - Projects that deliver measurable system value gain policy and market preference - Teams that secure grid connection and deliver stable commissioning become core winners   Tender 8 competition is no longer only about “who is cheaper”, but also “who is more system-integrated”.   QED reinforces this message. System value, not peak price, is becoming the scarce commodity.   The key question is no longer “do we need 4h storage”. The key question is: Can the storage solution carry system-level responsibility?   ✅ Takeaway Australia’s storage market is pivoting from trading around volatility towards supporting system resilience. Storage assets designed for system services and secure delivery will sit on the advantaged side of this transition.   🤔 Question  How is your storage strategy shifting from arbitrage towards a system-value model that aligns with tenders such as CIS Tender 8?   #TechToValue #EnergyStorage #BESS

Social resilience now runs through electricity. If households stay locked into gas, they stay exposed to imported fuels, geopolitical shocks and price spikes they cannot influence. Electrification is industrial strategy. It is sovereignty strategy. It is social protection. Yet in many EU countries, households still pay two to three times more per kWh for electricity than for gas. That gap is designed. It slows heat pumps. It weakens electrified industry. It stretches retrofit economics in multi-family housing. It keeps fossil imports structurally competitive. At the same time, pressure on the EU ETS is rising. Italy’s proposal to compensate gas plants for carbon costs signalled that carbon pricing could be neutralised nationally. Markets reacted. EUA prices fell from above €90 to around €70 as political risk was priced in. The emissions cap did not change. The legal framework did not change. Perceived stability did. A credible carbon price is what makes gas progressively less competitive. Undermining it raises regulatory uncertainty, increases the cost of capital and delays electrification across housing and industry. For housing and social professionals, this debate is central. If electricity remains relatively expensive: • Social landlords face weaker investment cases • Tenants remain exposed to fossil volatility • Decarbonisation becomes slower and more unequal Tariff design decides who carries transition risk. Accelerating electricity competitiveness means: • Shifting levies away from electricity • Preserving ETS integrity and price clarity • Reinvesting carbon revenues into grids and electrification • Reducing political risk around the carbon signal Reducing imports strengthens sovereignty. Strengthening electricity strengthens resilience. As long as gas remains structurally favoured, households remain the shock absorber of our energy system.