The paradox of the energy transition is that, because of the low marginal costs of new renewable energy sources (RES), it drags electricity prices down and discourages investments in flexible productions that are needed to compensate for the lack of dispatchability of the new RES - the energy transition discourages the investments that are required for its own harmonious expansion. To investigate how this paradox can be overcome, we argue that future electricity prices can be accurately modeled from the residual load obtained by subtracting the sum of inflexible productions from the load. Armed with the resulting quantitative economic indicator, we investigate future revenues for power plants with various degree of flexibility under different scenarios for the energy transition in the European power grid. We find that flexible productions will be financially rewarded better and sooner if the energy transition proceeds faster but at more or less constant total production, i.e. by reducing the production of thermal power plants at the same rate as the production of RES increases. Less flexible productions, on the other hand, will see their revenue grow more moderately. Our results advocate for a faster energy transition with a quicker withdrawal of baseload thermal power plants.
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