Solar capture rate in Hungary: the real solar price, with a worked example

Solar capture rate is the output-weighted price a solar park earns, divided by the average baseload price. In Hungary it fell from about 90% in 2020 and 2021 to 57.5% in 2025, on this site's calculation from public day-ahead prices. Montel reports 90% falling to 55% in the first half of 2025.

Figures are as of October 2026. The series, hour counts and curtailment test below are this site's own calculation from public data, run on 10 October 2026. The last section gives the method.

What are the capture price and the capture rate?

The capture price is the average price a generator actually receives, weighted by its output. The capture rate is that price as a percentage of the baseload price, which is the average of the price over every period. GEM Energy Analytics defines the solar capture rate as the solar capture price relative to the average day-ahead price, with the weights set by solar production.

The formula is short:

• Capture price = sum of (output in each period x price in that period) divided by total output.
• Baseload price = average of the price over every period in the year, each period weighted by its length.
• Capture rate = capture price divided by baseload price.

A park that produced only in hours priced at EUR 20/MWh, in a year averaging EUR 100/MWh, would have a capture rate of 20%. Here the price is the day-ahead price from the auction run by the Hungarian Power Exchange (HUPX), where electricity is traded for next-day delivery. A park on a feed-in tariff, or a fixed-price power purchase agreement (PPA), does not earn the capture price directly. The capture price is still the market value of its output.

Why does the capture rate fall as solar grows?

Because solar plants all produce in the same hours, so they add supply when prices are already low. This is called cannibalisation: each new solar park lowers the price that every solar park earns.

Hungary's solar fleet grew fast. Montel says the country had a little over 700 MW in 2018. pv magazine, citing the Hungarian Photovoltaic Industry Association (MANAP), reports 8,373 MW cumulative at the end of 2025, after 1.1 GW added that year.

The effect shows in the shape of the day. These are average Hungarian day-ahead prices for April to September 2025, by hour of the day (local time, hour beginning), from the Energy-Charts API:

A park producing around 13:00 sells at roughly a tenth of the price at 19:00. The baseload price blends all hours, so the solar-weighted price sits well below it.

How far has the Hungarian solar capture rate fallen?

On this site's calculation, the rate fell from 89.2% in 2020 and 90.5% in 2021 to 63.4% in 2024 and 57.5% in 2025. Montel reports the same direction: a fall from 90% in 2020/21 to 55% in the first half of 2025.

Montel does not define its baseline or its solar output series. To test the figure, the rate was recalculated from public data: the Hungarian day-ahead price and the national solar output series, both from the Energy-Charts API, matched period by period. For the first half of 2025 the recalculation gives 52.0% against Montel's 55%. The two agree on the scale of the fall, not to the point.

Source: this site's calculation from the Energy-Charts API (Fraunhofer ISE), using the day-ahead price for bidding zone HU and Hungary's public net solar production. Calculated on 10 October 2026. The last column is the share of the period's solar energy produced when the price was below zero.

Two details matter. The fall was not a straight line: 2022 had a baseload price of EUR 271.7/MWh and a rate above 100%, so solar hours were priced above the average. And the rate is seasonal, as the part-year figures below show.

What do the part-year figures show?

The second quarter (Q2) is the weakest, and 2026 so far looks like 2025. H1 means the first half of the year.

January to September 2026 gives 56.1% against 54.9% for the same months of 2025, with a higher baseload price and a smaller share of solar output at negative prices. A part-year figure is not a full-year figure: the fourth quarter of 2025 came out at 80.5%, with no negative-price hours.

For context, GEM reports 2024 capture rates (January to October) of 60% for Germany, 67% for France, 68% for Spain and 71% for Greece. The same method gives 65.7% for Hungary over those months. The methods are close but not identical, so the comparison is indicative.

How many negative-price hours does Hungary have?

On day-ahead prices, Hungary had 281 hours below zero in 2025 and 262 in 2024, against 74 in 2023 and 8 in 2021. Counting hours at exactly zero as well gives 344 for 2025 and 306 for 2024. Published counts differ mainly because some count only prices below zero and others count zero as well.

The counts use the same Energy-Charts day-ahead series, and each clock hour counts once. From 1 October 2025, when the day-ahead market moved to 15-minute periods, each hour is priced at the mean of its four quarter-hours. All of the negative-price hours of 2025 fell between January and September.

Other published counts match when the definition matches. Hungary's Ministry of Energy counted 93 zero-or-negative hours in 2023 and 306 in 2024, and 309 in January to August 2025, as reported by Portfolio.hu. The same counts from this series are 93, 306 and 309. Electricity Maps counts negative hours only: 261 for 2024 and 277 for 2025, against 262 and 281 here. Vantage Energies, using data from the European transmission operators' network (ENTSO-E), publishes monthly counts of hours at or below zero that sum to 251 for January to September 2026, the same as this series.

The deepest prices are recent: about minus EUR 210/MWh on 11 May 2025, and minus EUR 500/MWh for six consecutive quarter-hours on 26 April 2026, in the Energy-Charts series.

How do negative prices and curtailment change it?

Negative prices pull the capture price down, and curtailment (switching output off) removes the worst periods from the average. Both change the number, but not in the same direction or by the same amount in euros.

Curtailment is already visible in the market. Montel reports that industrial-scale operators cut output when day-ahead prices turn negative, and that up to 500 MW "disappeared" in a single quarter-hour on 21 June 2025. It also notes that only about 1.4 GW of Hungary's 4.6 GW of solar plants above 50 kW is exposed to market prices through PPAs or the spot market. The rest is on feed-in tariffs or premiums and has little incentive to flex.

The table below tests what curtailment does, using the same price and output data. It assumes a fully market-exposed park, with no support scheme, that either sells through negative prices or switches off whenever the price is below zero, at no cost.

Curtailing lifts the headline capture rate for 2025 from 57.5% to 66.3%. But revenue per available MWh moves only from 57.5% to 59.1%, because 10.9% of the energy is given up. The capture rate describes the price per delivered MWh. Revenue depends on the price and the volume together.

What does a worked example for a 50 MWp park look like?

The example below is illustrative. It is not a forecast and not any real park. It uses a 50 MWp (DC module capacity) fixed-tilt park facing south, with a specific yield from the Photovoltaic Geographical Information System (PVGIS) of 1,252 kWh per kWp per year. That is the PVGIS result for 35 degrees tilt, 14% system losses and a point on the Great Plain (47.17 N, 20.2 E, near Szolnok), so annual output is 62,600 MWh. The baseload price is set at EUR 100/MWh for easy arithmetic. The 2025 actual was EUR 108.5/MWh.

Revenue here is gross market revenue: output times capture price, before balancing costs, trading fees, support payments and taxes.

The park produces the same 62,600 MWh in every row. Only the timing of the output relative to the market has changed. To earn the 90% case revenue at a 55% capture rate, the baseload price would have to be about EUR 164/MWh (EUR 90 divided by 0.55), instead of EUR 100.

Applying the 2025 curtailment case to the same example: selling through negative prices at a 57.5% rate gives about EUR 3.6 million, and curtailing below zero about EUR 3.7 million. The gain is small because the capture rate rose while the volume fell.

What can solar park owners do about a falling capture rate?

Owners can change when the park sells (storage), when it produces (layout), who carries the price risk (PPAs) and whether it produces in the worst hours (curtailment). Each lever has a cost, and none is free.

• Storage. A battery moves midday energy into the evening. The price table above shows why: EUR 18.9/MWh at 13:00 against EUR 178.6/MWh at 19:00 on average in April to September 2025. How a battery energy storage system (BESS) earns money in Hungary is covered in Hungary's BESS revenue stack after PICASSO and MARI. SolServices' public statements on its 150 MW / 300 MWh programme are summarised in why SolServices is adding battery storage.
• Layout. East-west layouts and tracking systems spread output across more of the day, so more of it falls outside the midday price trough. The only quantified study cited here is an EWI Cologne analysis for Germany. It found that tracking would have earned a 43% higher market value than fixed systems in 2024. It was commissioned by Nextpower, a tracker supplier, and covers two example systems, so it does not transfer directly to Hungary. SolServices describes Lumen Park Mezőtúr (66.3 MWp) on its project page as bifacial modules on a sun-tracking system. The page does not state the tracker type.
• PPAs. Who carries the capture-rate risk depends on the contract. Pay-as-produced and pay-as-nominated PPAs split the risk differently, and the choice matters more as the rate falls.
• Curtailment strategy. The test above shows that curtailing below zero adds about 1.6 points of revenue over 2025 and about 5 points in the second quarter. A park on a support scheme may have different incentives from a merchant park. How the KÁT feed-in tariff and the METÁR renewable support scheme treat negative prices is set out in METÁR vs METÁROLÓ vs KÁT.

What this means for solar park owners, investors and corporate buyers

• Owners of market-exposed parks: track the capture rate and revenue per MWh each month, not only the baseload price. A rising baseload price can hide a falling capture rate: from 2024 to 2025 the baseload price rose from EUR 100.8 to EUR 108.5/MWh while the solar capture price fell from EUR 63.9 to EUR 62.4/MWh.
• Investors and lenders: a revenue model should apply a capture rate to the baseload curve and test a range. The example above shows a swing of 39% in revenue between 90% and 55%, with nothing else changed.
• Corporate buyers of solar power: the price of a PPA depends on which side carries the shape and capture risk. Read the structure before comparing headline prices.
• Parks planning storage or new layouts: the capture rate is the base case against which any added revenue has to be measured.

How were the capture-rate figures calculated?

Every capture-rate, negative-price-share and hour-count figure in this article is this site's own calculation from public data, run on 10 October 2026. None of it comes from a company's own metering. The steps are:

1. Prices. The Hungarian day-ahead price (bidding zone HU) from the Energy-Charts API, call price?bzn=HU, licensed CC BY 4.0. Prices were hourly until the end of September 2025 and quarter-hourly from 1 October 2025.
2. Output. Hungary's public net solar production from the same API, call public_power?country=hu, production type "Solar", in 15-minute values. Data run to 9 October 2026, and the 2026 figures cover January to September.
3. Matching. Each 15-minute output value is multiplied by the price in force in that period. The capture price is the sum of these products divided by total output.
4. Baseload. The average of all prices in the year or quarter, each weighted by its length, so hourly and quarter-hourly periods count correctly. Years and quarters follow Budapest time.
5. Hour counts. Each clock hour counts once. From 1 October 2025 it is priced at the mean of its four quarter-hours.
6. Curtailment test. Output is set to zero whenever the price is below zero, at no cost, and the capture price is recalculated on the output that remains.

As a check, the same method applied to Germany for January to October 2024 (day-ahead price for the German-Luxembourg bidding zone, DE-LU, and German public net solar production) gives 60.8%, against the 60% published by GEM. The hour counts agree with the Ministry of Energy, Electricity Maps and Vantage Energies as shown above.

The limits are these. The output series is the public national series, a proxy for the national solar profile and not for any one park. Montel notes that household and commercial rooftop solar mostly serve local demand and do not appear directly in grid statistics. A single park's rate depends on its location, layout, curtailment and trading. The figures use day-ahead prices only and leave out balancing costs, fees and support payments. Data providers can revise their series, so a re-run may differ slightly. The full-year 2025 rate is 57.49% before rounding.