Morning edition · Friday, 30 October 2026
The wind fell by seven-eighths, and gas almost trebled
SMARD's receipts for Thursday, the dearest power day of 2026, are in. They show who left the grid between Monday and Thursday, and who was paid to fill the gap.
On Thursday, German wholesale power cost more than on any other day this year: the day-ahead price for Germany and Luxembourg averaged €314.85 per megawatt hour2. A day later the receipts are in, and they read less like a mystery than like a roll call.
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price from 1 September to 30 October 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. It reaches a September high of €256.55 on 14 September, falls to €30.12 on Saturday 24 October and €13.12 on Sunday 25 October during the storm, then climbs to €249.21 on 28 October and €314.85 on Thursday 29 October, the highest daily average of 2026 so far. The latest value is €268.62 for delivery on Friday 30 October.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), delivery days 1 Sep to 30 Oct 2026, retrieved 30 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 |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-25 | 13.12 |
| 2026-10-26 | 116.57 |
| 2026-10-27 | 155.11 |
| 2026-10-28 | 249.21 |
| 2026-10-29 | 314.85 |
| 2026-10-30 | 268.62 |
Who left. On Monday 26 October, onshore wind turbines generated 688.8 gigawatt hours, according to the Bundesnetzagentur’s SMARD figures; on Thursday they generated 97.3 GWh1. Offshore farms fell from 136.9 GWh to 11.6 GWh over the same days1. Desk arithmetic: wind as a whole dropped from about 826 GWh to about 109 GWh, a fall of roughly seven-eighths in three days.
Who filled in. Gas-fired plants went the other way, from 105.4 GWh on Monday to 283.3 GWh on Thursday1. Desk arithmetic: that is about 2.7 times as much. Demand barely moved: grid load was 1,343.0 GWh on Monday and 1,357.5 GWh on Thursday1. So the country did not suddenly use more electricity. It used the same amount from dearer machines, and paid the price of the dearest one needed in each hour. The daily average rose from €116.57 on Monday to Thursday’s €314.852.
Today. For Friday 30 October the auction cleared at an average of €268.62, about €46 below Thursday2. Lunchtime is the cheapest stretch, at €215.00 for 12:00 to 13:00 CET, and the early evening the dearest, at €345.93 for 17:00 to 18:00 CET2.
The calm point. A still, grey week in late October is not a failure of the grid; it is the grid doing exactly what it was built to do, calling up reserve plants when the wind drops. The bill for that is visible, hour by hour, a day in advance, and that openness is worth more than any speech about it. On a dynamic tariff, the middle of the day is your friend today. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
A price is a sentence; the generation table is the paragraph that explains it.
Sources
- Market data: realised generation by source (wind onshore, wind offshore, natural gas) and grid load, Germany, hourly, 26 to 29 October 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 30 Oct 2026, 05:20 CET.
- Market data: day-ahead price DE-LU, hourly, delivery days 1 September to 30 October 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 30 Oct 2026, 05:18 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.