Greece cleared at an average of approximately €116.50/MWh, with prices ranging from around €25/MWh to €174/MWh. Unlike the previous session, when HEnEx prices reached zero during a solar-heavy period, the latest curve avoided a clearly negative settlement.
However, the absence of negative prices does not eliminate the underlying market challenge. Strong solar generation continues to depress daytime electricity values, while gas-fired power plants increasingly determine the marginal price during the morning and evening periods.
Greece can export electricity northwards through Bulgaria and North Macedonia when solar generation is strong and domestic prices are relatively low. As photovoltaic output declines later in the day and Greek gas generation becomes more expensive, those flows can reverse. The value and direction of cross-border transmission can therefore change significantly within a single day.
Curtailment is also becoming an increasingly important variable for renewable project economics. A solar plant can maintain its expected technical annual yield while its commercially saleable output declines because the power system cannot absorb all available generation during saturated hours.
For project financing, this makes it essential to distinguish between weather-related production losses, grid-driven curtailment and price-driven economic shutdown. These factors have different impacts on revenues and should not be treated as equivalent risks.
Conventional solar PPAs based on fixed annual volumes can also create additional imbalance and delivery exposure when curtailment, low prices or grid instructions prevent the contracted output from being delivered. As a result, new contracts are increasingly incorporating hourly shaping, storage integration, floor-price mechanisms and explicit allocation of curtailment risk.
Greece’s market is therefore moving beyond a simple solar expansion model. As photovoltaic penetration increases, the commercial value of generation will increasingly depend not only on how much electricity a project produces, but when it produces and how flexibly that output can be delivered.
