In early 2026, the EU experienced more than 1,200 hours of negative electricity prices.

Omissions

• The 1,223-hour figure aggregates negative-price hours across all EU-27 day-ahead bidding zones, not the number of distinct clock hours during which some part of the EU experienced negative prices. Q1 2026 contains only 2,184 total clock hours; summing across all bidding zones inflates the figure dramatically. A listener could easily interpret the claim as meaning that negative prices occurred during more than half of all hours in early 2026, when in reality the per-zone incidence was far lower.
• Only a single independent secondary source (pv-magazine, citing analytics data) was found confirming the exact 1,223 figure. No primary official source (e.g. ACER, Eurostat, or the original Montel Analytics dataset) could be accessed to corroborate the number independently.
• The source was published on 2026-05-08, which is before the session date of 2026-06-17, so the MEP could have known this data.
• The claim uses the vague term 'early 2026'; the corroborating data covers Q1 2026 (January–March) specifically, which is a reasonable but not exact match.

Sources

• Secondarypv magazineDay-ahead markets across the EU-27 cleared 1,223 hours below zero in Q1 2026. That is more than double the 593 hours recorded in Q1 2025.