Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI
Pith reviewed 2026-06-26 20:44 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Deep neural networks paired with explainable AI show solar power shapes European electricity prices far beyond its share of generation, while gas prices and interconnections act as steady drivers.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
By training DNNs on European electricity price data and extracting feature attributions via SHAP and the SSHAP framework, the analysis establishes that renewable sources especially solar play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite lower generation shares, gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across markets, and interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, while a synthetic EU-wide single-price market is constructed to explore the counterfactual of full integration.
What carries the argument
SHAP values and SSHAP aggregation applied to DNN models trained on electricity price data from 39 bidding zones.
If this is right
- Gas prices act as a dominant and consistent driver across all examined electricity markets.
- Interconnections significantly shape price dynamics and underscore the interdependence of European electricity systems.
- A synthetic model of a fully integrated EU market with a single price enables exploration of counterfactual price outcomes.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- If the solar attribution holds under higher renewable penetration, price volatility in sunny zones may decline faster than conventional models expect.
- The same XAI pipeline could be rerun on future data to test whether the identified drivers shift after major policy changes such as expanded carbon pricing.
- High correlations among energy variables may still require separate validation experiments to confirm that attributions are not artifacts of multicollinearity.
Load-bearing premise
The DNNs capture the true underlying drivers of price formation rather than spurious correlations, and the SHAP and SSHAP attributions faithfully reflect the model's decision process without distortion from feature correlations or model misspecification.
What would settle it
Periods of high solar output where the models do not attribute large price reductions to solar, or where removing gas price inputs fails to change predictions in line with the reported attributions.
Figures
read the original abstract
Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript trains deep neural networks on data from 39 European electricity bidding zones to predict prices, then applies SHAP and an extended SSHAP aggregation method to attribute feature importance. It claims that renewable sources (particularly solar) exert a disproportionately large influence on price formation relative to their generation share, that gas prices are a dominant and consistent driver, and that cross-border interconnections materially shape price dynamics. A synthetic EU-wide market is also constructed to examine the counterfactual of full integration under a single price.
Significance. If the attributions can be shown to be robust, the scale of the analysis across dozens of zones and the SSHAP extension could provide actionable insights for renewable integration and market-coupling policy. The work also demonstrates a practical workflow for combining high-capacity predictors with post-hoc explanation in a high-stakes domain.
major comments (3)
- [Abstract and Methods] Abstract and Methods: The central claim that solar 'plays a disproportionately important role in price formation' and that gas/interconnections are 'dominant drivers' interprets SHAP/SSHAP values as structural effects. No description is given of how the DNN architecture, training procedure, or SSHAP extension mitigates the known instability of additive attributions under multicollinearity (solar generation correlates with demand, irradiance, other renewables, and time-of-day).
- [Results] Results (feature-importance rankings): The reported importance orderings are presented without accompanying robustness diagnostics such as (i) retraining after orthogonalizing correlated renewable features, (ii) comparison against permutation importance or conditional SHAP variants, or (iii) any causal-identification strategy. This leaves open whether the 'disproportionate role' finding survives feature dependence.
- [Synthetic-market counterfactual] Synthetic-market counterfactual: The construction of the EU-wide single-price scenario relies on the same fitted models; without explicit checks that the DNNs generalize under the altered interconnection structure, the counterfactual price distribution may simply extrapolate the same correlational patterns rather than reflect a new equilibrium.
minor comments (2)
- [Methods] Notation for SSHAP aggregation is introduced at a high level; a concise mathematical definition (or pseudocode) in the Methods section would improve reproducibility.
- [Introduction] The manuscript would benefit from explicit comparison to earlier econometric studies of European electricity prices that already document gas-price and interconnection effects, to clarify the incremental contribution of the XAI layer.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive comments on our manuscript. We address each major comment point by point below, indicating where revisions will strengthen the presentation of methods, results, and limitations.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: Abstract and Methods: The central claim that solar 'plays a disproportionately important role in price formation' and that gas/interconnections are 'dominant drivers' interprets SHAP/SSHAP values as structural effects. No description is given of how the DNN architecture, training procedure, or SSHAP extension mitigates the known instability of additive attributions under multicollinearity (solar generation correlates with demand, irradiance, other renewables, and time-of-day).
Authors: We acknowledge that multicollinearity can affect the stability of SHAP attributions, particularly for solar generation which correlates with demand and other variables. The DNN architecture captures nonlinear interactions, and the SSHAP aggregation across 39 zones is intended to improve robustness by averaging attributions. However, the original submission did not explicitly address mitigation strategies or compare to conditional variants. We will revise the Methods section to discuss this known limitation of additive feature attributions and add a supplementary comparison using permutation importance to evaluate ranking stability. revision: yes
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Referee: Results (feature-importance rankings): The reported importance orderings are presented without accompanying robustness diagnostics such as (i) retraining after orthogonalizing correlated renewable features, (ii) comparison against permutation importance or conditional SHAP variants, or (iii) any causal-identification strategy. This leaves open whether the 'disproportionate role' finding survives feature dependence.
Authors: Our work applies XAI to observational predictive models and does not claim causal identification, which would require additional assumptions or instruments outside the paper's scope. Orthogonalization of features risks distorting the natural time-series structure of electricity data. We will add permutation importance rankings as a robustness check in the revised results and supplementary materials. We will also clarify in the text that the reported importance reflects model attributions under observed correlations rather than isolated structural effects. revision: partial
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Referee: Synthetic-market counterfactual: The construction of the EU-wide single-price scenario relies on the same fitted models; without explicit checks that the DNNs generalize under the altered interconnection structure, the counterfactual price distribution may simply extrapolate the same correlational patterns rather than reflect a new equilibrium.
Authors: The synthetic EU-wide market is presented as an exploratory counterfactual to illustrate potential effects of full integration, using the trained models on adjusted interconnection features. We agree that explicit generalization checks under structural changes are absent and that results may reflect extrapolation. We will revise the relevant section to explicitly discuss this limitation, clarify the illustrative nature of the exercise, and note it as an area for future work involving equilibrium models or simulated structural shifts. revision: yes
Circularity Check
Empirical XAI attribution on observational data; no derivation reduces to inputs by construction
full rationale
The paper trains DNNs on European electricity market data and applies SHAP/SSHAP for feature attribution. No equations, first-principles derivations, or 'predictions' are shown that reduce to fitted parameters or self-citations by construction. The central claims are empirical interpretations of model outputs on external data. SSHAP is mentioned as an extension but is not load-bearing for the reported drivers; the analysis remains falsifiable against held-out market observations. This matches the default expectation of no significant circularity.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
Reference graph
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