€314.85 for Thursday, and no cheap hour in the book

This morning’s edition reported €249.21 per megawatt hour for Wednesday’s power and called it the dearest day since mid-September. The auction for Thursday has since cleared, and it has gone further. The German-Luxembourg day-ahead price for delivery on Thursday 29 October averages €314.85 per MWh, according to SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s data portal¹. Desk arithmetic from SMARD’s daily series: that is the highest daily average this year, above 14 September’s €256.55, and the highest since 12 December 2024, when it reached €395.34¹.

Look at the night, not the peak. The headline hour is the one everyone will quote: €559.63 for the hour from 17:00 to 18:00, when lights, cookers and the end of the working day arrive together¹. The more telling number is at the other end. The cheapest hour of Thursday, 02:00 to 03:00, still clears at €231.00¹. Desk arithmetic: the cheapest hour of tomorrow is dearer than the average of every day this year except today and 14 September. A normal autumn night has slack in it. This one has none.

Why there is no slack. The wind that made Sunday almost free has not come back, and the plants that fill the gap burn gas. Europe’s benchmark gas contract, the Dutch front-month at the TTF hub, briefly touched €100 per MWh at around 14:35 CET today, the first time since December 2022, Reuters reports, as disruption to Middle East shipping of liquefied natural gas keeps supply tight before winter². Gas-fired plants typically set the power price in the hours of highest demand, the report notes². Gas now trades at around triple its level before the Iran war, according to the same report, and that arithmetic reaches every hour a gas plant runs².

What this is, and what it is not. A day-ahead price is a wholesale auction for one day’s delivery. It is not your tariff, and most households will not see Thursday on their bill directly. Suppliers buy months ahead. But a run of dear days is what suppliers will price into the contracts they write for next year, and Reuters cites analysts who expect at least another year of high gas prices even if the war ends and the winter is mild². The dull defence is the same as yesterday’s: storage, interconnectors, flexible demand, and a grid that can move power from where the wind is to where you are. It is not glamorous. It is what would have made tonight’s order book thinner. Nothing here is investment advice.