Evening edition · Friday, 30 October 2026
€251.42 for a Saturday, and the weekend discount went missing
Friday's auction has priced Saturday's power. It is the dearest Saturday of the year by a distance, and eight times last Saturday's bill.
Weekends are usually where German power gets cheap. Factories idle, offices empty, and the auction clears lower. Not this one. Friday’s day-ahead auction priced Saturday 31 October at an average of €251.42 per megawatt hour for Germany and Luxembourg, according to the Bundesnetzagentur’s SMARD figures1.
Bar chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price on each Saturday of October 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. Saturday 3 October was €169.01, 10 October €51.08, 17 October €168.27 and 24 October €30.12. The latest value, for delivery on Saturday 31 October, is €251.42, the highest for any Saturday in 2026.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), daily averages, delivery days 3 to 31 Oct 2026, retrieved 30 Oct 2026, 16:30 CET · CC BY 4.0. Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, market data. CC BY 4.0.
Data (CSV) · SVG · PNG
Latest values as a table
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Sat 3 Oct | 169.01 |
| Sat 10 Oct | 51.08 |
| Sat 17 Oct | 168.27 |
| Sat 24 Oct | 30.12 |
| Sat 31 Oct | 251.42 |
The comparison. Last Saturday, 24 October, cost €30.12, on a day when onshore wind turbines generated 1,009.2 gigawatt hours1. Desk arithmetic: this Saturday is a little over eight times that. Across 2026, no Saturday has come close: the next-dearest was 3 October at €169.011. Saturday is also the fourth-dearest delivery day of the whole year so far, behind Thursday’s €314.85, Friday’s €268.62 and 14 September’s €256.551.
The shape of the day. The cheapest hour on Saturday is 12:00 to 13:00 CET, at €220.25, and the dearest is 18:00 to 19:00 CET, at €298.971. Desk arithmetic: Saturday is €17.20 cheaper than Friday on average, so the weekend discount is there, just very small.
The background. On still days it is often gas plants that set the price, and gas is dear: Dutch TTF futures for December rose 4.9% to €102.78 per megawatt hour on Friday, CNBC reported, the highest in almost four years2.
The calm point. The receipt is printed a day ahead, hour by hour, for anyone to read. If you have a dynamic tariff, Saturday lunchtime is still the cheapest slot, and the washing machine does not care what day it is. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
A weekend is a calendar fact; a cheap weekend is a weather fact.
Sources
- Market data: day-ahead price DE-LU, daily and hourly, delivery days 1 January to 31 October 2026; realised generation, wind onshore, 24 October 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 30 Oct 2026, 16:30 CET.
- A cold winter risks another gas price shock in Europe as stocks dwindle to record lows — CNBC, 30 Oct 2026, 12:49 CET.
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.