Prices
If weather drove the European electricity market, a country whose heating demand jumped would be a country whose price jumped. In no year measured is that so.
Heating degree days are the standard demand proxy: for each day, how far the mean temperature sat below a base of 15.5 °C, summed over the year. If weather drove the European electricity market, a country whose heating demand jumped ought to be a country whose price jumped.
A correlation runs from -1 to +1, which is why the axis above is drawn over the whole range rather than zoomed to the bars. Across 18 consecutive year-pairs the strongest relationship in any single year is 0.46 in absolute terms, and even that year leaves only 20.7% of the variation in price accounted for. Pooled over all 630 country-years the correlation is 0.006 and the share of price movement it explains rounds to 0.0% of the total.
That is not a weak effect. It is the absence of one, measured the same way in every year-pair above.
Prices diverged most in 2023 across 38 countries, where the price change spanned 279.5 percentage points while heating demand spanned 57.1 points.
The point at the top is Netherlands at 245.4% for the year, and it is not a weather story at all: the Dutch energy-tax cut landed in the first half of 2022, so that year's annual average is a price nobody paid for a full year and the year after rebounds against it. Its heating demand moved 0.1% over the same pair.
So what. For prices, weather is ruled out: over the whole European panel, the year-over-year change in heating demand carries essentially no information about the year-over-year change in household electricity price, in any year measured. What is left is tax, network cost and gas exposure — which is where the Currency page picks the story up, since a further slice of the same movement turns out to be the euro rather than the electricity.