West Europe had very low electricity prices last afternoon

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Electricity prices in Czechia. Source: electricitymaps. Modified screenshot(cropped, colors downsampled, title moved downwards, structure of graph left untouched)

I used to make articles like this years ago. Yesterday I was looking at the electricity prices, which I don't do nearly as regularly anymore as back then, and then I saw HOLY MOLY -500 EURO/MWh???

Yes, -500 euro per MWh, or -50 cents/KWh. I don't think I've ever seen it this low. If sold at market price, producers would pay 500 EUR/MWh to the consumer of the power.

There was some wind, and it was cloudless on this day for much of west Europe, which resulted in ample of renewable electricity production. The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia, Poland all recorded near levels of -500 EUR/MWh around 13:00 - 15:00(CEST is UTC+02:00, which results in peak sun being around 13:40 for the Netherlands for example, and not 12:00).

For pretty much the whole of western Europe(except the Netherlands and Denmark) there was also a public holiday(labor day), which also resulted in less electricity load than an ordinary Friday. It looked more like the load of a Saturday.

Great Britain remained with positive prices, around 90 GBP/MWh, while Denmark hovered around zero and Southern Norway had positive prices(who obviously imported power at that time)

As intermittent power sources take a larger share of the grid's production, I presume this will happen more regularly, and also in the opposite way with high electricity prices. There is a big incentive for demand based on supply in this regard(i.e. electric cars charging/washing machines working based on electricity supply), and also in energy storage, even if inefficient.

Prices became much higher around 19:00, when households like to cook and the solar panels don't generate nearly as much.

I guess it would've been an interesting day as a grid operator.

Also, since the last article in 2020 about this, when there were "high" electricity prices, proved to be pathetic compared to 2022 energy prices. If I take data from electricitymaps, the average price/MWh in 2022 was 235.92 EUR/MWh for Germany for example. You can see some graphs about that here.