What if midday solar glut drives sustained negative power prices?
Sustained midday negative prices from solar oversupply crush merchant-generator and unhedged-solar economics; the trade is power-producer equity and a bid for storage/flexibility, while the mapped copper leg is marginal. Rhymes with California/CAISO and German midday negative-price episodes that hammered merchant solar capture rates. Skeptical: negative prices are a duration/capture problem, not a macro shock — the real winners are batteries arbitraging the duck curve, so this is a relative-value, not directional, story.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Midday solar oversupply drives sustained negative wholesale prices, forcing curtailment and crushing generator economics. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.