Sunday long-read · Sunday, 1 November 2026
€13.12 last Sunday, €255.91 this one
Two Sundays, one week apart, and the same quiet day of the week priced nearly twenty times higher. The storm left; the wind went with it; the bill came back.
Last Sunday, 25 October, German and Luxembourg buyers paid a daily average of €13.12 per megawatt hour for electricity on the day-ahead market1. Storms were crossing the country, and the wind was doing the work. This Sunday, 1 November, All Saints’ Day and a public holiday in parts of Germany, the same auction settled at €255.911. Same day of the week, lower demand than a working day, and a price nearly twenty times higher. By SMARD’s daily series, it is the fourth-dearest delivery day of 2026, behind only 29 and 30 October and 14 September1.
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price for the two weeks from 19 October to 1 November 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. In the first week it falls from €208.44 on Monday 19 October to €30.12 on Saturday 24 October and €13.12 on Sunday 25 October, during the storm. In the second week it climbs to €314.85 on Thursday 29 October, then holds at €268.62 on Friday and €251.42 on Saturday. The latest value is €255.91 for delivery on Sunday 1 November.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), hourly values averaged by delivery day, 19 Oct to 1 Nov 2026, retrieved 1 Nov 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 |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-27 | 155.12 |
| 2026-10-28 | 249.21 |
| 2026-10-29 | 314.85 |
| 2026-10-30 | 268.62 |
| 2026-10-31 | 251.42 |
| 2026-11-01 | 255.91 |
The week in prices. The chart is the whole fortnight, taken straight from the regulator’s market-data platform1. The first week slid from €208.44 on Monday 19 October to €30.12 on the Saturday and €13.12 on the Sunday. The second climbed back: €116.57 on Monday 26 October, €249.21 on Wednesday, €314.85 on Thursday, the dearest day of the year so far, then €268.62 on Friday and €251.42 on Saturday1. Desk arithmetic: the average for the seven delivery days from 19 to 25 October was about €135.07; for 26 October to 1 November it was about €230.24, roughly 70% higher.
The week in wind. The reason is not mysterious, and it is not a scandal. On Sunday 25 October onshore and offshore wind together generated about 1,112 GWh; on Saturday 31 October, about 115 GWh2. Desk arithmetic: about a tenth. The weather service’s October review names the storms, Luise and Manja, which brought long, heavy rain to the west on the 23rd and 24th3. When the storms passed, the turbines slowed, and the market went back to burning things.
What it means for you. Very little, directly, this week. Most households pay a fixed tariff, and the day-ahead price reaches them slowly, through suppliers’ purchasing, months later and averaged. A dynamic tariff passes the swing through faster; that cuts both ways, as these two Sundays show. Nothing here is investment advice.
The constructive reading. A market that can price the same Sunday at €13 and at €256 is not broken; it is telling the truth about the weather, hour by hour, in public. The data are free, published by the Bundesnetzagentur, and anyone can check them1. The useful response is dull: more storage, more cross-border cables, more demand that can wait for the cheap hours. The fortnight above is the business case, already printed.
What to watch
- Monday's day-ahead auction, published on SMARD around midday, which prices the first working day of November.
- Whether the wind returns: offshore output fell to 3.5 GWh on Saturday, from more than 100 GWh a day earlier in the week2.
A storm is a discount you cannot book in advance. The rest of the year is paid at list price.
Sources
- Marktdaten: Großhandelspreis Deutschland/Luxemburg (day-ahead, filter 4169), hourly values 19 Oct to 1 Nov 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, retrieved 1 Nov 2026, 09:00 CET.
- Marktdaten: Realisierte Erzeugung, Wind an Land (4067) und Wind auf See (1225), hourly values 19 Oct to 31 Oct 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, retrieved 1 Nov 2026, 09:00 CET.
- Deutschlandwetter im Oktober 2026 — Deutscher Wetterdienst, 30 Oct 2026.
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.