Vienna hit 41 degrees on Tuesday, the hottest day Austria has ever recorded. Records fell across Central Europe within hours of each other. By evening, electricity prices had spiked to more than five times their daytime low.
Czechia felt it just as hard. Half of the country’s weather stations broke their own absolute temperature records on Tuesday, with the highest reading reaching 41.5 degrees. Hospitals felt it immediately: emergency departments in Prague reported patient numbers up by 15 per cent, and one, Na Františku, by half.
Austria and Slovakia set their own records the same day, Vienna at 41 degrees and Bratislava at 40.6. According to the energy analytics firm Amper Meteo, the heat is now showing up directly in electricity markets. Czech spot prices normally fall to zero on sunny days, as solar panels flood the grid. On Tuesday, they stayed above €80 per megawatt hour all day. By evening, as air conditioning demand peaked and solar output faded, prices spiked past €400.
Poland’s power plants feel the heat too
The reason is simple. Europe’s rivers are too warm and too low to cool the power plants that need them. The problem reaches well beyond the Danube: the Rhine has already pushed German industry to the brink. On Tuesday, Poland’s Kozienice and Połaniec coal plants both scaled back output because of falling water levels in the Vistula. Combined, the two stations lost around 1.1 gigawatts of capacity.
“The availability of water from the Vistula has a direct impact on the stability of our technical processes and the security of the national power system,” said Krzysztof Bomba, a spokesman for the plants’ operator, Enea Wytwarzanie. His counterpart at Połaniec, Justyna Kosowicz, said the plant was adjusting some units to current conditions. The water level, persistently low, stood at around 110 centimetres in Warsaw on Monday.
You might be interested
Poland’s grid operator, PSE, responded by calling in emergency reserve capacity on Tuesday afternoon. It was only the fourth time the company has done this since it was founded, and the second time this year alone. Officials said the system remained well prepared to meet demand. But they did not rule out further such measures in the coming days.
Romania, meanwhile, is asking industry to help absorb the shock. More than 80 large energy users began cutting or pausing production this week. They include carmakers Dacia and Ford, and together they aim to save around 200 megawatts of electricity. Romania’s only nuclear plant continues to run on reduced capacity. Hungary’s sole nuclear plant, Paks, came close to the same fate. “Around 1:30 a.m., we came within a couple of millimetres of a complete shutdown of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, but then the water level stopped dropping,” Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said. The plant narrowly avoided what would have been its first full stoppage in 44 years.
Brussels insists the grid can cope
The European Commission says it is watching closely but sees no reason to panic yet. “We keep following and monitoring very closely the situation in Hungary as well as in Romania, Bulgaria, and other countries in the region,” spokeswoman Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters on Tuesday. She said the Commission stood ready to convene an emergency Electricity Coordination Group as soon as needed. For now, she said, regional solidarity mechanisms between member states meant there was no security-of-supply problem.
I would not say that nuclear energy is unreliable or unsafe in any way.
— Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, European Commission Spokesperson
Itkonen held her ground. A reporter asked whether the shutdowns undermined the Commission’s earlier praise of nuclear power as reliable, safe and homegrown. “I would not say that nuclear energy is unreliable or unsafe in any way,” she said. “What this clearly shows is that extreme weather events have to be taken into account in national risk planning, which is already taking place.” The plants still have contingency systems in place, she added. Neighbouring countries can also step in with electricity when one grid comes under strain.
For now, the region simply has to trust that promise. The heat should ease slightly by the weekend. But rain, the one thing that would actually refill the rivers, is nowhere in the forecast.
