Four prices, one machine

The Price of Being in Malmö

On any morning this July, a factory in Luleå and a factory in Malmö drew their electricity from the same synchronous grid, bought it through the same day-ahead auction, and had it delivered by the same transmission operator, at prices that had almost nothing to do with each other. Through the first eighteen days of July 2026 the auction cleared bidding zone SE1, the far north around Luleå, at an average of €15.73 per megawatt-hour. Roughly twelve hundred kilometres south, in bidding zone SE4 around Malmö, it cleared at €94.93. Same country, same machine, same hours: six times the price.

That is not a crisis reading, and it is not a rounding artefact of one strange week. It is the ordinary condition of the Swedish power market, and it has a cause with a name, a map, and an unfinished construction schedule. Sweden is one of the very few countries in Europe that has already done the thing energy economists spend their careers recommending: it broke its single national price into pieces, one per bottleneck, so that the market would say out loud where the grid is short. It has four such prices. And it is the clearest possible demonstration that saying where the grid is short is not the same as fixing it. The fixing needs wires to move the power and generation where the load is, and over the past two years Sweden has been refusing the second. On 16 July 2026, two days before this was written, the government approved two offshore wind farms and rejected eleven, most on the grounds that the turbines would degrade the country's ability to see and shoot down incoming missiles. The day after the approval, the developer of one of the two farms it had just cleared walked away from the project, saying prices were too low to build and there was no grid at sea to connect it to anyway.

This is the story of a grid whose market map was finished in 2011 and whose physical build never caught up.