Electricity That Costs Nothing—or Even Less? It’s Happening More and More
A surge in wind and solar power means many businesses and consumers around Europe can get paid for plugging in. The U.S. could be next.
5 min
KERKDRIEL, the Netherlands—For much of the spring and summer, Jeroen van Diesen got paid for using electricity.
Sometimes his neighbours came over to power up too, generating even more cash.
Van Diesen’s situation reflects the strange, new dynamics of electricity that could soon become the norm in many parts of the world: A big increase in wind and solar power has pushed wholesale prices to zero or below for many hours of the year, spurring a sea change in the way people use power—based on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
Most people pay a fixed price for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they consume throughout the day. The price is set by their power company and only changes at infrequent intervals—once a week, a month or even only once a year.
Van Diesen, a software salesman, recently signed up to receive electricity from two providers that charge him the hourly price on the Dutch wholesale power market, rather than a fixed price that resets monthly or annually. When the price of electricity falls low enough, smart meters in his house begin charging his two electric cars.
Wholesale prices swing wildly each hour of the day, and even more so as a larger share of electricity flows from wind and solar installations. Because the generation costs of wind or solar farms are negligible, market prices will be near zero when there is enough renewable power to cover most of a region’s electricity demand.
Electricity market dynamics get weirder when renewable-energy producers don’t have an incentive to stop feeding power into the grid, usually because of government subsidies. Then grids can be flooded with excess power, pushing prices into negative territory.
Van Diesen said he’s made 30 euros, equivalent to around $34, over the past five months charging his car, enough to cover the service fee from his power supplier, a Norwegian company called Tibber.
“I’m charging the car for free,” said van Diesen, who is part of a group of clean-energy enthusiasts in the Netherlands who call themselves green nerds. “To me it’s also like a hobby and a game—how far can I go?”
Doing laundry in the evening? The electricity could be free a few hours later when demand dies down and the wind picks up. Likewise, in regions with lots of solar power, charging an electric vehicle in the morning is usually far more expensive than powering up under the midday sun—or whenever the price is right.
In the U.S., most states don’t currently allow such real-time pricing, but many think that will change. Already, in some of the world’s biggest economies from Western Europe to California, the occurrence of zero and negative wholesale power prices is growing fast.
Negative prices
Wholesale prices across continental Europe have fallen to zero or below in 6% of all hours this year, up sharply from 2.2% in 2023 and just 0.3% in 2022, according to data collected by Entso-E, the group of European transmission system operators. In markets with lots of renewable capacity, this year’s figure was higher: 8% in the Netherlands, 11% in Finland and 12% in Spain. Analysts expect those numbers will grow as more solar panels and wind turbines are installed.
The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, show what could happen in the U.S. in a few years when renewable capacity reaches a similar scale. In 2023, 44% of EU electricity was generated by renewables, compared with 21% in the U.S.
In some U.S. markets—sunny California, the wind-swept Great Plains, and Texas—zero and negative prices are already common. The wholesale price in Southern California was negative nearly 20% of all hours this year because of the region’s boom in solar-panel installations. That compares to around 5% last year, according to data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
U.S. regulators have been cautious about allowing households and companies to sign up for electricity plans that charge them wholesale prices, fearing consumers could be hit with big bills if prices jump. Texas consumers who signed such contracts were walloped with huge bills in 2021 when a rare winter storm sent prices soaring.
States’ reluctance, however, may now be waning as policymakers increasingly see real-time pricing as a way to lower peak demand, reduce the need for costly infrastructure and integrate more renewables into the grid.
California regulators this year ordered the state’s utilities to expand dynamic price pilot programs that have only been available for a select group of customers.
Your overall power bill still won’t be zero in a clean-energy future. Generation costs comprised around 60% of customer bills on average in the U.S. in 2023. Transmission and distribution costs account for most of the rest—and are expected to grow sharply in the coming decade to reinforce the grid for electric heating, electric transport and data centers.
Negative prices could also be reined in over the next few years as governments from Europe to California pare back renewable-energy subsidies. Governments are particularly focused on trimming subsidies for solar power, which is driving negative prices in a number of markets.
Green nerds
In Europe, energy-hungry manufacturers are shifting their operating strategies to maximise energy consumption when prices are close to zero or negative, while throttling back when prices are high.
Linde, a U.K.-based engineering company, is building a new generation of industrial gas plants that can be quickly ramped up and down depending on the wholesale price of power.
When solar and wind power drive prices down, Linde’s plants fire up and send the output to large tanks. When electricity prices shoot up again, the plants can ramp back down and supply customers out of the gases stored in the tanks.
“The tank functions like a virtual battery,” said Klaus Ohlig, a research and development executive at Linde Engineering.
Trimet, an aluminium producer that is one of Germany’s single-largest power consumers, is overhauling its smelters to vary their power consumption depending on the availability of renewable energy on the grid.
A new European Union law requires dynamic-price power contracts be made available to consumers across the 27-nation bloc. Tibber, a power retailer based in Norway that charges its customers the wholesale hourly price, has signed up more than one million households across the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands.
Edgeir Aksnes, Tibber’s co-founder and chief executive, says he doesn’t expect customers to constantly track the hourly price before deciding when to charge their car or run appliances.
“We can automate all of this for you. You don’t have to think about it,” he said.
Some enthusiasts, however, like to get into the weeds.
Wouter van Embden, a 49-year-old Dutch entrepreneur and one of the country’s so-called green nerds, switched to Tibber earlier this year. On a recent summer Sunday, the battery in his home began charging as solar power flooded the Dutch grid and the wholesale power price fell to zero. He also charged his two electric cars and programmed his heat pump to make the water in the house tank extra hot.
Toward the evening, as prices rose with the drop-off in solar, van Embden’s battery—which he and his son built at home—would power his home as well as feed into the Dutch grid.
“I have to be honest, when I started building the battery I had so many outages. There was a lot of testing to do,” he said. “But now it’s working pretty stable.”
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The voices reshaping how Australians think about money — and why credibility matters more than reach.
6 min
The best financial advice many Australians are receiving right now is not coming from licensed advisers charging by the hour. It is coming through a phone screen, in the ten minutes between work and dinner, from creators who have built credibility the hard way: by being right, being transparent, and being specific in a space where vagueness has always been the easy default.
This is not a ranking by follower count. Follower count is a measure of distribution, not of quality. What follows is a ranking by substance — credentials, accuracy, community depth, and the quality of what an audience actually learns from following these accounts. The distinction matters, because the Australians acting on this content are making real financial decisions with real money.
1- Queenie Tan – Corporate Authorised Representative; Co-Founder & Director, Invest With Queenie & Billroo
There are finance influencers who talk about building wealth, and there are those who document it in real time with receipts. Queenie Tan belongs firmly in the second category. Starting from a $400-per-week income, Tan built her net worth past $1 million while publishing the actual numbers — income, savings rate, investment decisions — for an audience of more than 400,000 across platforms.
She is a Corporate Authorised Representative, co-founder of the personal finance app Billroo, and the author of a book that has become a practical reference for young Australians navigating ETFs, superannuation and property. What separates her from the crowded field of money educators is precision: she does not talk in principles when she can talk in percentages.
2- Alan Kohler – Editor-in-Chief, Eureka Report; Editor-in-Chief, InvestSMART Group; ABC News finance presenter, host of Inside Business.
If Queenie Tan represents the new wave of personal finance creators, Alan Kohler represents something the new wave will spend decades trying to build: institutional credibility that has survived multiple economic cycles. As Editor-in-Chief of the Eureka Report and InvestSMART Group, and a decades-long presence on ABC News, Kohler has spent more than thirty years making financial analysis accessible without dumbing it down.
His coverage of RBA decisions, market movements and economic policy is cited by podcasters, journalists and fund managers alike. He is not chasing virality. He does not need to.
3- Aleks Nikolic – Corporate lawyer; host, Big Swinging Stocks podcast
Most finance creators address the mechanics of money. Aleks Nikolic addresses the psychology — and that distinction explains why her following is as loyal as it is. Operating as Broke Girl Wealth across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Nikolic covers ETFs, crypto and investment strategy, but her real differentiator is a willingness to discuss the emotional architecture of financial decision-making.
Shame around debt. Fear around market volatility. The limiting beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know. In a space where confidence is routinely performed, her candour is a genuine competitive advantage.
4- Bryce Leske & Alec Renehan – Equity Mates Media
Equity Mates did not build a following. They built a media company. What began as a podcast by two friends learning to invest has grown into Australia’s most established investing media brand, covering ASX stocks, ETFs, global markets and fund manager interviews across podcast, social and YouTube.
The longevity is the credential. Equity Mates has operated through multiple market cycles, a global pandemic, and a generational shift in how Australians engage with investing — and its audience has grown through all of it. When the hosts speak, their listeners know they have been paying attention for years.
5- The Lazy CEO – CEO & Founder, Showpo; Shark Tank Australia investor
The metric that matters most on social media is not followers — it is engagement, because engagement signals trust. Jane Lu, known as The Lazy CEO, maintains an engagement rate of approximately 1.15 per cent on Instagram, which is exceptional for a finance account of his size. Her 242,000-plus followers are not passive consumers: they ask questions, share experiences and apply what they read.
Her content focuses on business finance and wealth building, and the active comment sections are the clearest possible evidence that her audience does not merely scroll past.
6- Tash Invests – Founder, Tash Lends; Forbes Australia 30 Under 30
Tash Invests built her following on a premise that sounds simple but is rarer in practice than it should be: she publishes the actual numbers. Not approximations or ranges or anonymised case studies — her salary, her savings rate, her portfolio value, her net worth, updated and on the record.
Having bought her first property at twenty-two and grown her documented net worth past $1 million, she has become the primary reference point for young Australians trying to understand what building wealth on a moderate income genuinely looks like. The specificity is the product.
7- David Scutt – APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group
The authority of most finance social media content rests on research and reading. David Scutt‘s authority rests on having done the job. A former Treasury Dealer at Arab Bank and the Commonwealth Bank, former ASX Business Supervisor, and former Global Markets Editor at Business Insider Australia and anchor at ausbiz TV, Scutt now brings that direct market experience to his role as APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group, rather than relying on secondary commentary.
When he discusses foreign exchange movements or ASX dynamics, it is not because he has read about them. It is because he has traded them.
8- Meddy Demars – Investing & crypto content creator
The gap Meddy Demars fills is specific and underserviced: connecting global macroeconomic events to the practical reality of Australian investors. When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, when inflation data moves, when commodity prices shift — most Australian finance content either ignores the local implications or translates them poorly.
Demars, operating across TikTok and Instagram from Sydney, does the translation well: explaining what global conditions mean for Australian stocks, savings rates and investment portfolios in terms that are accessible without being condescending.
9- Simran Kaur – Founder, Friends That Invest
Friends That Invest is arguably the most successful community-building exercise in Australian personal finance, and Simran Kaur is the reason why. The New Zealand-based creator — whose audience is predominantly Australian — built a podcast, a book and a social media presence around a single insight: that the personal finance world was not speaking to young women, and that the consequences of that gap were significant.
The measurable cultural shift that followed — women engaging with investing concepts in communities that had not previously existed — is the kind of impact that most financial literacy programmes aim for and rarely achieve.
10- Effie Zahos – Money Editor at 9News
Effie Zahos is one of Australia’s most recognised financial commentators, appearing regularly across 9News, A Current Affair, Today and Today Extra as 9News Money Editor. Her role puts everyday money questions, from mortgage rates to cost-of-living pressures, in front of a national broadcast audience.
Before television, she spent years as editor of Money magazine, building the editorial foundation for her current commentary. She is also Director and Money Commentator at InvestSMART, an ambassador for Canstar, and a published author, with her financial advice available in print as well as on screen.
That combination, decades of editorial experience, an active broadcast presence, and a body of published work, is what makes her commentary carry weight beyond any single platform or post.
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