In a market, when demand falls while production increases, prices fall. On the electricity market, they can even become negative – in other words, the producer pays to place his electrons. These periods were extremely rare until 2022. They represented nearly 150 hours in 2023, and are around 250 hours in the first half of 2024 alone. They are especially frequent in the early afternoon (due to the strong photovoltaic production) and on weekends, due to the drop in consumption of the tertiary sector. Another phenomenon is the drop in prices, stronger than before. The “half of the hours at negative prices have prices on average of – €15/MWh in 2023, and
of -16 €/MWh in 2024″, writes the CRE.
These phenomena strongly raise the question of electricity storage, as well as energy management system solutions, to very finely control consumption. At the scale of an energy-producing building, a period of negative prices constitutes a very strong incentive for storage, even if the obligation to purchase photovoltaics neutralizes this phenomenon for the moment. It remains to be monitored whether the State will not be tempted to modulate this obligation to curb the phenomenon.
