Introduction
Capture factors are the ratio of captured price (average volume weighted price) over baseload price.
For solar, typically capture factors are around 1 in winter and slightly lower in summer when most of the production occurs.
For wind, they tend to be lower in winter, where production predominantly occurs.
To illustrate the concept, assume a baseload price of 100 EUR/MWh, and an effective realized price of the asset of 95 EUR/MWh. This could be referred to by stating that the capture factor is 95%. This is equivalent to saying that the cannibalization is 5%, sometimes also expressed as absolute price difference (-5 EUR/MWh).
The historical capture factors reflect the fleet average based on ENTSO-E data.
The data reflect the actual realized hourly energy production of the fleet and hourly power prices. All hours are reflected in the calculation of historical capture factors - meaning that all negative price hours are included. This means the capture factors are presented without economic curtailment.
Technical details
With hourly prices and hourly volumes, historical capture factors c are calculated as the ratio of realized effective renewable energy price peff and the baseload price pBL, where (index i denotes hours):
