- A Finnish company made a huge mistake in an electricity bid, offering way more power than it had.
- This mistake drove Friday electricity prices down to negative €203 per megawatt-hour.
A jaw-dropping blunder in Finland's electricity market temporarily sent prices into chaos today — and could result in Finns actually being paid to use electricity.
Finnish energy company Kinect Energy admitted it accidentally offered to sell a huge amount of power for delivery tomorrow, over 5,700 megawatts an hour, far more than it could actually provide.
As a result, the price of electricity plummeted to negative €203 per megawatt-hour on Nord Pool, the Nordic region's electricity exchange.
Essentially, power was priced as literally cheaper than free in Finland for the day.
"Slightly simplified, you can say that they sold something they didn't have, and buyers bought something that doesn't exist," said Pontus de Mare, head of system operation at Svenska Kraftnat, speaking to Bloomberg News.
Finland's grid management agency, Fingrid, was forced to step in. It said it will now purchase the cheap electricity and try to balance things out for local customers by day's end.
Theoretically, this could mean some Finns would be paid to consume cheap electricity.
It mirrors a similar issue Finland faced — albeit not one created by human error — when electricity prices went negative due to an oversupply of electricity by hydroelectric providers in May of this year. (Consumers ultimately did not end up getting paid to use electricity then.)
While it could be great news news for Finns, who were told in 2022 to try to curtail sauna usage as energy prices spiked due to the war in Ukraine, Fingrid asked consumers to take it easy, even if prices are historically low.
"For the sake of the electricity system, it would be good if consumers did not overreact to negative electricity sentiments, because this is a market failure situation," Fingrid's Jonne Jäppinen told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.