Data story · frozen numbers
April 2026: French solar captured 8% of the power price
Published 2026-07-20 · every number below is a frozen row of the Capture Index
In April 2026, a megawatt-hour of French solar electricity earned, on average, €3.33. The average French day-ahead price that month was €39.56. That is a capture rate of 8.4% — and it is not a data error: 44% of all French solar generation that month was sold at negative prices. Producers paid the market to take almost half their output.
April is the cruelest month for solar economics — bright days, mild demand, hydro running — and 2026 printed the pattern at full scale across the continent:
| Zone | Solar capture rate | Market value | Baseload | Neg-price share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR | 8.4% | €3.33 | €39.56 | 44.0% |
| AT | 16.9% | €14.66 | €86.57 | 41.6% |
| DE-LU | 24.3% | €19.09 | €78.43 | 46.6% |
| BE | 26.6% | €20.96 | €78.81 | 43.8% |
| DK1 | 52.8% | €43.87 | €83.07 | 11.8% |
| DK2 | 52.9% | €41.94 | €79.27 | 9.7% |
| SE4 | 54.0% | €32.94 | €61.01 | 9.2% |
| NL | 54.7% | €46.22 | €84.50 | 30.2% |
| SE3 | 61.5% | €31.75 | €51.60 | 6.8% |
| SE2 | 90.1% | €22.32 | €24.78 | 6.9% |
April 2026, ten lowest solar capture rates. Frozen rows — these read identically forever.
What this means, depending on who you are
If you sign PPAs: a baseload-referenced price is fiction for solar in these zones — the capture discount IS the negotiation. If you finance projects: merchant tails priced off average power prices are mispriced by up to 10× in months like this. If you build batteries: this is your business case — the same negative midday prices destroying solar capture are the charging leg of the storage arbitrage revenues we index daily. And if you trade: capture spreads move month to month; the index carries the full history, and Scale keys get the only forward capture forecast published anywhere, scored daily in public.
Every month, on freeze day, the European Capture Report publishes the rankings, movers and records automatically — same numbers, no adjectives added.
The monthly European power roundup
Negative-price records, the biggest spreads, which zones were hardest to forecast — every number computed from our production data, on the 2nd of each month. No filler, unsubscribe anytime.