Morning edition · Monday, 26 October 2026
Storm power at €13, Monday's back at €116
German onshore wind passed 1,000 GWh on both weekend days, gas burned a sixth of what it did on Wednesday, and Sunday's power cleared at €13.12. The wind is dropping, and Monday's price has climbed back.
Onshore wind turbines in Germany generated 1,009.2 gigawatt hours on Saturday and 1,019.9 GWh on Sunday, according to SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s data portal1. A week earlier, on Wednesday 21 October, they made 242.3 GWh1. Gas-fired plants went the other way: 241.4 GWh on Wednesday, 42.5 GWh on Saturday and 43.5 GWh on Sunday1. Desk arithmetic: gas burned about a sixth of Wednesday’s amount. (Sunday had 25 hours, as the clocks went back.)
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price from 1 September to 26 October 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. It averages €144.82 in September, peaks at €256.55 on 14 September, reaching €211.94 for delivery on 21 October. It then falls to €148.61 on 22 October and €137.59 on 23 October, drops to €30.12 on Saturday 24 October and €13.12 on Sunday 25 October as storm-driven wind output passed 1,000 GWh a day, and climbs back to €116.57 for delivery on Monday 26 October, the latest value.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), delivery days 1 Sep to 26 Oct 2026, retrieved 26 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 |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | 211.94 |
| 2026-10-22 | 148.61 |
| 2026-10-23 | 137.59 |
| 2026-10-24 | 30.12 |
| 2026-10-25 | 13.12 |
| 2026-10-26 | 116.57 |
The auction followed the weather. The German-Luxembourg day-ahead price averaged €211.94 per megawatt hour for delivery on 21 October, €30.12 on Saturday and €13.12 on Sunday1. For Monday it is €116.571. Desk arithmetic: Monday’s power costs about nine times Sunday’s, and still about 45% less than last Wednesday’s.
The month as a whole is still dear. Over 1 to 26 October the daily price has averaged €154.41, against €85.93 over the same days of 20251. A windy weekend does not repay a month. And the Deutscher Wetterdienst expects a “transition to calm high-pressure weather” from midweek, cooling to average late-October temperatures2. Calm and cool is the combination that brings gas back into the merit order.
The lesson is not that wind is cheap on a stormy Sunday; everyone knows that. It is that the system had the turbines, the lines and the auction ready when the storm came, in the same week Brent had its best week since 2022. That is what boring, finished infrastructure looks like in a crisis. Nothing here is advice.
What to watch
The cheapest power of the year arrived in the middle of an oil shock. That is not luck; it is turbines someone permitted years ago.
Sources
- Market data: day-ahead price DE-LU, realised generation (wind onshore, natural gas, lignite), daily — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 26 Oct 2026, 05:30 CET.
- Synoptische Übersicht Mittelfrist — Deutscher Wetterdienst, issued 25 Oct 2026, 10:30 UTC.
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.
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