Morning edition · Thursday, 22 October 2026
The wind came back to the auction
Thursday's German power cleared at €148.61 a megawatt hour, 30% below Wednesday. Nobody gave a speech about it. The forecast simply had twice as much wind and sun in it.
Germany’s day-ahead power auction cleared Thursday’s delivery day at an average of €148.61 per megawatt hour, according to the Bundesnetzagentur’s SMARD data1. Wednesday’s delivery day had cleared at €211.941. Desk arithmetic: that is a fall of about 30% in a single day, and the cheapest day since 11 October (€122.31)1.
What changed. Not gas, not a summit, not a speech. The forecasts that the auction runs on changed. SMARD’s day-ahead forecast for Thursday puts onshore wind at about 634 gigawatt hours, against about 237 for Wednesday; wind and solar together come to about 920 GWh, against about 4212. Desk arithmetic: forecast wind and solar cover roughly 70% of Thursday’s forecast consumption of about 1,319 GWh, against roughly 31% on Wednesday2. When more hours are met by wind, fewer are set by a gas plant, and the average falls.
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price since July 2025, in euros per megawatt hour. Monthly averages stay between about €77 and €110 through July 2026, including the months after the war begins at the end of February; the daily low is −€16.34 on 5 April. The price climbs from August, averaging €144.82 in September with a daily high of €256.55 on 14 September, and €168.96 over 1 to 22 October, against €95.54 over the same days of 2025. The latest value, for delivery on Thursday 22 October 2026, is €148.61, down from €211.94 for Wednesday 21 October.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), delivery days to 22 Oct 2026 · CC BY 4.0. Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, market data. CC BY 4.0.
Data (CSV) · SVG · PNG
Latest values as a table
| Date | Day-ahead DE-LU |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-18 | 175.21 |
| 2026-10-19 | 208.44 |
| 2026-10-20 | 195.66 |
| 2026-10-21 | 211.94 |
| 2026-10-22 | 148.61 |
| 2026-10-23 | 137.59 |
What did not change. One windy day does not make a cheap month. Over 1 to 22 October the daily price has averaged €168.96, against €95.54 for the same days of 20251. Desk arithmetic: about 77% higher. September averaged €144.821. The chart’s shape is the one this desk showed yesterday: a calm spring and early summer, then an autumn that costs more1.
Why it matters to you. Most households do not buy at the day-ahead price; they buy through a supplier that hedges months ahead. What the auction shows is the cost of the marginal hour, and how much of that the weather can still take off. The case for grids and interconnectors rests on exactly this: a windy Thursday in the north is worth more if the power can travel. Nothing here is advice.
What to watch
A price that falls on a windy day is not a policy success or failure. It is the weather, reading out the invoice.
Sources
- Market data: day-ahead wholesale price, Germany/Luxembourg (filter 4169), daily — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 22 Oct 2026, 05:15 CEST.
- Market data: forecast generation (wind onshore, wind offshore, photovoltaics) and forecast consumption, Germany, daily — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 22 Oct 2026, 05:15 CEST.
Every figure in this piece traces to a source above or to the desk’s own arithmetic on those sources, marked as such. Quotations are short and attributed. Spot an error? Write to the desk; corrections are logged on the method page.
Commentary for information only. Not investment, legal, tax, medical or political advice. Not an offer or solicitation. Analysis may be incomplete or wrong. Charts show published public data, not a trading feed; binding numbers live with the institutions that publish them.