Engie is working on contracts with ‘Happy Hour’ to counter negative power prices

In the margin of the presentation of a new battery park in Kallo, Engie announced that he would put extra on flexibility, also with consumers. That would happen in the form of energy contracts with a ‘Happy Hour’.

Spokeswoman Hellen Smeets confirms. « We work on contracts that respond to flexibility and where customers are encouraged to plan their energy consumption when there is a lot of renewable energy. So a kind of Happy Hour, » said the spokeswoman.

In concrete terms, it would be about services that will be added to certain contracts, it sounds for clarification. « At certain times, electricity will be free, » it says. Engie is the largest supplier of electricity in Belgium. The company would come up with more details next week.

Engie is not the first to come up with such contracts. For example, Energie.be – a smaller player on the market – charges customers for consumption between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. Negative electricity prices are increasingly common on the energy market, at times when there is a lot of supply of herniabble energy. The market tries to find solutions to deal with negative prices, among other things by stimulating consumers to consume at such moments.

A comparison of energy prices on behalf of the various regulators of our country shows that Belgians pay less for natural gas than in most neighboring countries. As far as electricity is concerned, we are in the middle bracket.

Commissioned by the CREG, Brugel and the Flemish Utilities Regulator PWC compared the energy prices of January 2025 with prices in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. What turns out? Families and SMEs connected to low voltage take a middle position when it comes to their electricity invoice: we pay less for electricity than the Germans and the British, but more than the French and the Dutch.

We do less than a year ago, when we were also cheaper for electricity than the Dutch. While our northern neighbors saw their invoice fall in 2025, our invoice has risen due to higher energy costs and network costs. For natural gas, Belgium remains the cheapest except for the United Kingdom, despite an increased invoice.