[7thaccount]

The market price is based off the cost of the marginal MW for some of these auctions. They tried selling power, but someone accidentally said they'd sell for a very large negative euro per MW hour amount and that set the price for the entire market and obligated them to pay the market to sell power. This is pretty rare, but not unheard of.

[YetAnotherNick]

Can't officials just place a bid to buy power at whatever price(negative?) to even out the extra power that is not there?

[miohtama]

Sales are final.

The seller (Norwegian Kinect Energy) will need to negotiate with other major marker participants to bail them out. But it’s likely in the interest of everyone of not to let them collapse.

The markets would be in disarray if there would be undo button for a trade. Preparations need to be made by large industry participants for every daily allocation.

[euroderf]

It's Scando, so i would imagine that if the relevant ministers in FI SE NO all sign off, and no major market players (like Fortum) object, then they'll unwind it and fall back to replaying the previous day's bids. Or is this impossible ?

[miohtama]

It's impossible to undo because a lot of bids are build on the top of other bids. You would need to undo tons of history. A lot of legit players and traders would lose money. They would sue for market manipulation.

Let one who makes mistakes to pay for them.

However this does not prevent doing other trades on the top this trade to other direction. It is the question who catches the falling dagger and pays for the mistake of others.

See a similar story here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

[euroderf]

Responding to peer comments:

This is pretty clearly NordPool's fuckup. There's no way in hell this bid should have gone thru without human review. Seems clear that their UI is to some degree - in some critical spot - fragile, user-hostile, ill-designed.

You can say that in analogous cases, finance firms have been put out of business by bad bids caused by slipped fingers. Granted. But in this case you're throwing a wrench into a power grid, with the potential to cause a system disruption, in winter no less.

[XelNika]

There are many market participants, some of whom start trading on this information immediately. The Finnish grid is connected to the rest of Europe so a market participant could in principle flow this cheap energy from Finland all the way to Spain if the cables had capacity. I would guess it was too late the moment it happened.

[creer]

Sometimes it's a mistake, sometimes there really is a pile of power that has been contracted for, and is coming, and enough sinks that needed power which don't need any more power. There are power storage plants here and there - hydroelectric aside from small batteries. No doubt if one were on the path to this it might sink some of this power but they might be full or the grid in between the two spots might be full or they might already have their own contract in place sinking some nuclear power or who knows.

[7thaccount]

If it were on purpose I'd still expect the bid to not be so extreme. For example, maybe -5€/MWh and not the -250€ or whatever the number was. They could have still secured the sale without losing so much.

[7thaccount]

They prob didn't notice until the market closed. Even then, you can't just undo a bid like that unless they have some kind of emergency clause to fix mistakes like this.