Energy costs in Europe are skyrocketing foreboding an ominous winter. Yesterday the price of a megawatt hour in France broke all previous records by reaching € 900/MWh, while natural gas in the TTF far exceeded the barrier of 300 euros/MWh.

Energy costs in France are soaring as the country’s nuclear plants face further shutdowns, Bloomberg reports. Thus, futures rose by 15% to 900 euros per megawatt hour – more than 10 times compared to the same period last year.

The rise was due to Electricite de France SA’s announcement that more of its reactors would take longer than expected to come back on after the outage. The outages affect plants with a total capacity of 8,380 MW, or almost 14% of France’s total nuclear capacity.

In Britain, the energy regulatory authority, Ofgem, has announced that it will increase the ceiling on consumers’ energy bills from October.

The top price will be set at an average of £3,549 per year, up from £1,971 previously.

The price cap limits how much energy suppliers can charge domestic customers for their combined electricity and gas bills in England, Scotland and Wales, but has been recalculated by Ofgem for the whole year so that to reflect wholesale market prices and other industry costs.