€314.85 for today, and Wednesday's receipts explain it

The German-Luxembourg day-ahead price for delivery today, Thursday 29 October, averages €314.85 per megawatt hour, according to SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s data portal¹. That is the highest daily average of 2026 so far, above the €256.55 of 14 September¹. On Sunday 25 October, in the storm, it was €13.12¹. Desk arithmetic: today’s power costs about 24 times Sunday’s, and the price has risen on each of the four days since.

Wednesday’s receipts. This morning SMARD added what the plants actually did yesterday¹. Onshore wind generated 210,929 megawatt hours on Wednesday, against 1,019,966 MWh on Sunday¹. Offshore farms added 106,567 MWh¹. Desk arithmetic: onshore output was about a fifth of Sunday’s, and wind as a whole covered about 23% of Wednesday’s grid load of 1,383,280 MWh¹. Solar, in late October, added 102,699 MWh¹.

Who filled the gap. Gas-fired plants generated 241,979 MWh on Wednesday, against 43,542 MWh on Sunday¹. Lignite produced 267,508 MWh and hard coal 79,562 MWh¹. Desk arithmetic: gas output rose about 5.6 times in three days, and gas, lignite and hard coal together covered about 43% of the load. That matters for your bill because the last plant needed in an hour tends to set that hour’s price, and the gas it burns has rarely been dearer. The front-month Dutch TTF contract, Europe’s gas benchmark, briefly touched €100 per MWh on Wednesday afternoon for the first time since December 2022, RTÉ reports, citing ICE data².

The shape of today. The hourly prices are a timetable¹. The cheapest hours are in the night, with a low of €231.00 between 02:00 and 03:00 CET. The dearest is 17:00 to 18:00 CET, at €559.63¹. Desk arithmetic: that evening hour costs about 56 cents per kilowatt hour on the wholesale market, before network charges, taxes and levies. If you are on a dynamic tariff, the dishwasher has a better evening after 21:00 than before. If you are on a fixed tariff, your supplier bought most of today’s power long ago, and this auction reaches you slowly and averaged out².

The calm point. A still week in late autumn is not a crisis of the grid. The lights stayed on, and the old plants came back exactly as they are paid to. What the price records is the value of every megawatt hour that could have been stored on Sunday and sold today. That spread is public, on a government website, every morning. Nothing here is investment advice.