The summer Malmö stopped paying German prices

The Ninth of August

On Sunday 9 August 2026 the day-ahead auction cleared southern Sweden at 3.70 euros per megawatt-hour. The same auction, for the same hours, cleared Germany at 94.84. Between the two lies 250 kilometres of Baltic seabed and, until seven weeks earlier, a single 600 megawatt cable lying on it.

This is not a story about scarcity. Nothing broke in southern Sweden that week, no plant tripped, no reservoir ran dry, no heatwave arrived. The zone had more power than it knew what to do with, which is precisely the problem. Bidding zone SE4, the Malmö zone, spent the first half of August as one of the cheapest places to buy electricity in Europe while its neighbours across the water paid five, ten, twenty times as much. It did so because the wires that used to carry the difference had, one after another, stopped being able to.

Vantage has written before about the Swedish price map: four zones, a northern battery of water, a southern load, and a set of internal cross-sections too small to join them. That piece described a southern zone squeezed from both sides, starved of northern hydro and pulled upward by continental gas. This is what happened when the second squeeze was removed by a cable fault, and it turns out to be the more revealing half of the story.