Spain’s power price went negative for 853 hours this year; Finland’s for 43. Three years ago Spain had zero and Finland was the negative-price capital of Europe.

I was counting negative-price hours across European bidding zones (ENTSO-E day-ahead data) and the map has basically flipped in three years.

Same window each year, Jan 1 to Sep 7:

Spain: 0 (2023) → 161 → 420 → 853

Portugal: 0 → 145 → 149 → 457

Greece: 0 → 8 → 53 → 279

Finland: 218 → 493 → 368 → 43

Northern Sweden (SE1): 193 → 421 → 428 → 45

Germany and France meanwhile are roughly flat (317 and 417 this year).

Some things that surprised me digging into this:

Spain had 197 negative hours in February. February. That's more than Spain's entire history before 2024, in one winter month.

Finland had literally zero negative hours in Jan, Feb, March and August this year. Two years ago it led Europe.

The one northern zone still piling up negative hours is arctic Norway (NO4, 154 this year and still rising). Barely any transmission out of there, so the surplus has nowhere to go.

Italy has never had a single negative hour. Not because their grid is perfectly balanced, their market just floors the price at €0.

The Iberian side is the story everyone knows by now, record solar meeting flat demand. The part I find more interesting is the north: it didn't just slow down, it absorbed its surplus almost completely. Flow-based coupling went live in the Nordics, curtailment got more price-responsive, district heating is electrifying. But a ~90% drop in two years is wild. Curious what people here think did the most work.

(Counting method: an hour is "negative" when the hourly average day-ahead price cleared below €0. Totals in the press differ slightly because the market moved to 15-minute products last October and everyone counts differently.)