Evening edition · Tuesday, 3 November 2026
€248.99: Wednesday's power slips under €250, and the wind came back on land
Six delivery days above €250 end by €1.01, and Tuesday's turbines made as much power by mid-afternoon as Monday's did all day.
The streak is over, though only just. Today’s day-ahead auction set an average of €248.99 per megawatt hour for Germany and Luxembourg for delivery on Wednesday 4 November, the desk’s average of the 24 hourly results that SMARD published this afternoon1. That is €3.86 below Tuesday’s €252.85 and the first delivery day under €250 since 28 October1. The six days in between all cleared above it, peaking at €314.85 on Thursday 29 October1.
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price from 1 September to 4 November 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. It falls to €30.12 on Saturday 24 October and €13.12 on Sunday 25 October during the storm, climbs to €314.85 on Thursday 29 October, the highest daily average of 2026 so far, and stays above €250 for six delivery days: €268.62, €251.42, €255.91, €259.31 and €252.85 on Tuesday 3 November. The latest value is €248.99 for delivery on Wednesday 4 November, the first day below €250 since 28 October.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), delivery days 1 Sep to 4 Nov 2026; 4 Nov is the desk average of the 24 hourly results of the 3 Nov auction, retrieved 3 Nov 2026, 16:25 CET · 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 |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-30 | 268.62 |
| 2026-10-31 | 251.42 |
| 2026-11-01 | 255.91 |
| 2026-11-02 | 259.31 |
| 2026-11-03 | 252.85 |
| 2026-11-04 | 248.99 |
Don’t mistake a dip for a turn. Wednesday’s hourly prices still run from €209.12 for the 03:00 hour to €310.92 for 17:001. Desk arithmetic: the average is still about 61% above the €155.11 of Tuesday 27 October, the last day before the calm set in1. You are not looking at cheap power. You are looking at slightly less dear power.
The turbines came back on land. In the first 15 hours of Tuesday, to 15:00, onshore wind generated 132.8 gigawatt hours and offshore wind 61.2, SMARD’s provisional figures show1. Desk arithmetic: that is 194.0 gigawatt hours, almost exactly the 195.5 that all German wind produced across the whole of Monday1. Onshore alone has already beaten Monday’s full-day 73.7 by four-fifths1.
Gas has barely stepped back. Natural gas plants produced 193.9 gigawatt hours in the same 15 hours, against 316.3 for all of Monday1. Desk arithmetic: at that hourly rate a full day would come to about 310, hardly less than Monday. Lignite gave a little more ground: 153.8 gigawatt hours to 15:00, against 276.1 for Monday, a pace of about 246 for the day, roughly 11% less1. More wind so far has meant fewer fossil hours at the margin, not an empty gas fleet. These figures are provisional and will be revised1.
The quiet lesson is the oldest one in this market: the auction prices the weather that traders expect, not the speeches made about it. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
A streak is a headline; a dollar under it is a ledger. Read the ledger.
Sources
- Market data: day-ahead price DE-LU (hourly, delivery 26 Oct to 4 Nov 2026) and realised generation (natural gas, lignite, wind onshore, wind offshore), 2 and 3 November 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 03 Nov 2026, 16:25 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.