Poland sees more hours of negative electricity prices until June 2025 than in entire 2024
Until June 2025, Poland saw more hours of negative electricity prices than in the entirety of 2024, which shows how inflexible the Polish power system is, said Grzegorz Onichimowski, CEO of Poland's grid operator PSE, during a meeting of a Lower House of Parliament Sejm subcommittee.
"A few days ago, we adopted a new system in terms of non-market redistribution. It is a mechanism that we introduced, (...) out of desperation. The system does not have this flexibility today, nor does it have sufficient tools to manage surpluses from renewable energy sources," said Onichimowski.
He explained that these tools primarily involve energy storage and encouraging consumers to consume energy during periods of high supply and low prices.
"We already have many more hours with negative prices by June than we had last year for the entire year. This is a testament to how inflexible the system is," he added.
He expressed hope that part of this problem would be quickly reduced thanks to investments in electrode furnaces in heating plants and combined heat and power plants, as well as battery storage from the consumer level to the system level.
"We have already issued connection conditions for over 40 GW of energy storage, but we also have several thousand megawatts of real projects that are already covered by capacity contracts, so we can say that there is hope," emphasised Onichimowski.
He explained that the operator changed the non-market reallocation mechanism due to the "plague of meter contracts" between trading companies and generally small RES producers.
"In the case of generally small producers, unfortunately, a plague of so-called meter contracts has developed in Poland, i.e. electricity sales contracts, where the amount owed by the trading company to the RES producer is calculated on the basis of meter readings, i.e. how much the producer has produced is how much they are paid, which is an obvious misunderstanding of how the energy market works," noted the CEO of PSE.
He added that in such contracts, the buyer is to pay the seller regardless of who physically supplied the energy.
Non-market reallocation is a mechanism whereby RES energy producers receive an order from the system operator to reduce energy production in order to ensure system stability and security of supply.
jz/ han/
