Evening edition · Wednesday, 4 November 2026
€257.38: one day under €250, and Thursday is back above it
Wednesday's dip lasted exactly one delivery day; Thursday's auction puts the dear hours back where they hurt, at teatime.
This morning’s relief lasted one delivery day. Today’s day-ahead auction set an average of €257.38 per megawatt hour for Germany and Luxembourg for delivery on Thursday 5 November, the desk’s average of the 24 hourly results SMARD published this afternoon1. That is €8.39 above Wednesday’s €248.99, which had been the first day under €250 since 28 October1.
Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price from 1 September to 5 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, then climbs to €314.85 on Thursday 29 October, the highest daily average of 2026 so far. The six delivery days from 29 October to 3 November all stayed above €250, Wednesday 4 November dipped to €248.99, and the latest value is €257.38 for delivery on Thursday 5 November.
Source Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead price DE-LU (filter 4169), delivery days 1 Sep to 5 Nov 2026, retrieved 4 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 |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-31 | 251.42 |
| 2026-11-01 | 255.91 |
| 2026-11-02 | 259.31 |
| 2026-11-03 | 252.85 |
| 2026-11-04 | 248.99 |
| 2026-11-05 | 257.38 |
The shape matters more than the average. Thursday’s night is cheaper than Wednesday’s: the hour from midnight cleared €196.97, the lowest single hour since Wednesday 28 October1. The evening is dearer: €349.36 for the 17:00 hour and €346.14 for 18:00, the highest hourly prices since Thursday 29 October1. Desk arithmetic: the gap between Thursday’s cheapest and dearest hour is €152.39, against €101.80 for Wednesday1. If you can move a wash, a charge or a heat pump’s boost out of the early evening, Thursday is a day when it is worth the trouble.
Wednesday’s wind came from land, not sea. In the first 15 hours of Wednesday, to 15:00, onshore turbines produced 238.3 gigawatt hours, SMARD’s provisional figures show, already most of the 279.3 they made across all of Tuesday1. Offshore wind fell away: 30.3 gigawatt hours in the same 15 hours, against 89.5 for the whole of Tuesday1.
Gas has eased, not left. Natural gas plants produced 182.3 gigawatt hours to 15:00 on Wednesday1. Desk arithmetic: at that hourly rate a full day comes to about 292, some 6% below Tuesday’s 310.01. These figures are provisional and will be revised1. More wind trims the fossil hours at the margin; it does not yet empty them.
The auction does not reward hope or punish speeches. It prices the hours traders expect to be short, and on Thursday those are the hours when you come home. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
A streak that breaks for one day has not broken. It has paused for breath.
Sources
- Market data: day-ahead price DE-LU (hourly, delivery 26 Oct to 5 Nov 2026) and realised generation (natural gas, wind onshore, wind offshore), 3 and 4 November 2026 — Bundesnetzagentur / SMARD.de, retrieved 04 Nov 2026, 16:23 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.