These negative prices were notably listed in July 2024, recalls Test-Achats, which implies that the Belgian electricity market recorded a record number of hours where certain Belgians were paid for their electricity consumption.
And to the representative of Green 4 Power to explain this phenomenon: “With all the people producing photovoltaic energy at the same time and the production, faced with storage which does not develop, which does not evolve… These were prices so low that we could not manage to evolve the installation’s business plan.”
A complicated reality for a project which has yet to be built, and which is expensive. “A floating solar installation is a little more expensive to build and maintain than one on a wasteland, for example.”
But the file is in progress, and Jean-Benoît Sepulchre is delighted about it. “This is the most exciting project of 2025. We are showing that we can do things together that are good for the community at large, for the environment, for energy. We must move forward with this climate goal.” Sonegiens can get involved in this project, by taking a share of 250 euros in the CLEF cooperative, regardless of ecological concerns or financial interest, with the payment of a dividend.
For him, the future of this style of project depends on the capacity of the network. “It is necessary to install a storage infrastructure with all the technologies that exist and are still to be developed. This too is a very important issue; in Perlonjour, the market prices which fell, showed that it is not yet ripe.”
And the context of the price surge in general explains this delay. “The war in Ukraine and the scarcity of certain components, notably transformers, meant that we were no longer sure of being able to build. So we didn’t sit idly by.” And their solution was to change the layout of the installation, to find a new floating system to build cheaper, “and which will be cheaper to maintain in the future.” The current file is therefore well advanced, and should allow the trio of actors to communicate more information soon.
