“Free” electricity is available more often than ever. This year already more often than in all of last year

Negative electricity prices on the Czech day-ahead market occurred for a total of 182 hours in the first half of the year. Thus, in the first half of this year alone, there were substantially more of them than in the whole of the previous year, when negative electricity prices occurred for 134 hours. Last year was already a record year in terms of the number of negative prices. 

Negative electricity prices have returned to the Czech Republic in full after the energy crisis. During the years of the energy crisis, namely in 2021 and 2022, negative prices almost disappeared. There were 33 such hours in total in 2021 and only 8 a year later.

However, as electricity prices on wholesale markets fell, negative prices returned to the market. Their number was already record-breaking last year. In order to be able to feed electricity into the power system at all, generators had to pay for doing so in a total of 134 hours.