On 17 September 2026, Poland's energy regulator URE published the schedule for this year's renewable energy auctions. Seven sessions will run between 2 and 10 November. They offer up to 76.1 TWh of electricity worth PLN 24.9 billion under 15-year contracts for difference (CfDs).

On paper, the Polish solar CfD is less generous than its British counterpart. Its top-up is the difference between a solar farm's strike price and TGeBase, the average day-ahead price across all 24 hours. It is not based on the price solar actually sells at.

Since solar sells most of its output around midday, when Polish prices now fall to less than half of that average, the top-up does not cover the gap. So far in 2026, a solar farm that won at the PLN 389/MWh auction maximum would have earned PLN 201/MWh on every MWh put through the contract. A merchant farm selling all its output at market prices earned PLN 297/MWh.

Yet solar developers keep bidding, because in practice they use the contract differently from a standard CfD. They treat it as a floor under part of their output rather than a fixed price for all of it. The rules allow this, but the scheme's designers did not intend it.

Key takeaways

• A solar bid at the PLN 389/MWh ceiling would have earned less than merchant sales in every year from 2022 to 2026.
• Solar winners in 2025 bid roughly 520–650 MWh per MW a year, half to two-thirds of annual expected output.
• Bidding half its output and settling only the minimum would have left a solar farm with PLN 297/MWh over 2023-2025, against PLN 177/MWh with all its output under the contract.

On paper, a solar CfD has paid less than the market every year since 2022

Each winner is paid its own bid, its strike price, for 15 years. Bids cannot exceed the government's reference price, PLN 389/MWh for solar above 1 MW since 2023, and last year's winning solar bids ranged from PLN 216/MWh to PLN 329/MWh.

A bid at the ceiling rarely wins even when an auction is undersubscribed, because winning bids can cover no more than 80% of the volume offered by all bidders, a rule meant to force competition when too few projects bid. Bids are ranked on price alone, so at least the most expensive fifth of the offered volume always loses, and 22 of the 98 valid bids in last year's above-1 MW auction lost as a result.

The contract is two-sided and settles against TGeBase, the average of each day's hourly prices on the TGE day-ahead market. The settlement operator Zarządca Rozliczeń pays the generator the difference when TGeBase is below the strike, and the generator pays it back when TGeBase is above.

Because the top-up is measured against the daily average rather than what the farm achieves, a solar farm earns its strike minus the within-day discount, the gap between the daily baseload price (TGeBase) and the lower price solar achieves on the same day, which averaged PLN 188/MWh in 2026, and at the ceiling that has left the contract below merchant sales in each of the last five years.

Bidding into the auction at all looks counterintuitive when looking at the numbers. When the 2025 auctions ran in early July, TGE's baseload contract for 2026 averaged PLN 414.53/MWh. A bid at the ceiling therefore locked in PLN 26/MWh below the market before the solar discount.

On those terms, the auction offered a fixed price below what the market expected baseload power to fetch. It worked as a hedge priced under the market rather than a subsidy. It still left the solar plant exposed to the gap between the baseload price and what solar actually earns.

Solar developers use the CfD as a floor, not a fixed price

So if a merchant asset performs better than a CfD asset, why are developers still bidding?

This is because the contract is less binding than a straight swap. Auction winners choose how much of their generation to put through the scheme. The above-1 MW auction contracted 15.8 TWh over 15 years from 1,623 MW of solar and 83 MW of wind. That is roughly 520 to 650 MWh per MW of solar a year, against the 1,000 to 1,100 MWh a Polish solar farm typically generates.

Solar winners therefore bid only half to two-thirds of their expected output. They need to report just 85% of that in each three-year period to avoid a fine. That leaves an average farm free to sell 45% to 60% of its output outside the contract and to choose which months' output it reports.

That flexibility turns a low strike price into something closer to a floor. At 2026 prices, a PLN 217/MWh winner would pay back PLN 268/MWh on every MWh it reported. It is therefore better off keeping as much output as it can outside the contract in high-price years and reporting it when prices fall.