upsuper

The regulation applies in the opposite side as well. I think the highest bid allowed is like A$16.8/kWh or something like that.

It's not fully clear to me how the market work as a whole. I learnt that generators may have swap contracts with retailers and big users, which, based on my understanding, can distort the price to arbitrarily low, because generators get paid for the difference from the other side regardless of spot price, so they can set the lowest possible to ensure they can dump their power to the grid.

Also when it's predicted to be this low (or that high), there is likely some operations (market or not) behind the scenes to level the price. Usually when it gets to the time, the actual spot price has been in a reasonable range.

It's only -€0.2/kWh, not that bad at all. I've been seeing spot price predicted to be -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation). Even in Europe, I recall seeing some post desperately trying to figure out how to curtail their solar export because the price was reaching -€0.34/kWh. Not sure an error of -€0.2/kWh is anything newsworthy TBH.

Free energy is not necessarily a fantasy. In Australia, the wholesale electricity price regularly goes into negative, usually many hours in an average day, reaching as low as -70c/kWh occasionally (more commonly -5c/kWh). There is just no enough energy sink to absorb all the power we generate from solar in the day time. If we can store some of this energy in a stable form, that would be a good win.