Morning edition · Thursday, 5 November 2026
€196.97 at midnight, €349.36 at five: Thursday's power has a long evening
Germany's day-ahead price is back above €250 on average. The average hides the shape: a cheap night, a dear dusk, and five hours above €300.
Electricity for delivery in Germany and Luxembourg on Thursday 5 November averages €257.38 per megawatt hour on the day-ahead market, according to SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s data platform1. That ends a one-day pause: Wednesday averaged €248.99, the first day below €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 5 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 average is the least interesting number in the auction. The hourly values on SMARD start at €196.97 in the hour after midnight and stay near €200 until 06:001. Then comes a morning hump, €294.75 between 08:00 and 09:00, a midday trough back near €203, and the real bill at dusk: €332.25 from 16:00, €349.36 from 17:00, €346.14 from 18:00 and €339.56 from 19:001. Desk arithmetic: five hours, from 16:00 to 21:00, clear €300; the gap between the cheapest and dearest hour is €152.39.
The shape is the story of a November day. The sun sets before five, households switch on lights and cookers, and the price is set by whatever plant can still answer. Desk arithmetic: of the eight delivery days from 29 October to 5 November, seven averaged above €2501.
There is a quiet argument here for the dull equipment. On Wednesday the ECB’s Christine Lagarde, writing ahead of COP31, said better storage would help carry cheap solar power into the evenings, and cited industry research that each euro spent upgrading the grid saves more than €2 in other system costs2. She was talking about summer heatwaves2; Thursday’s auction makes the same case in November, hour by hour.
If your tariff is dynamic, the useful thing is not the average but the clock: the dishwasher at 02:00 costs a different market than the dishwasher at 18:001. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
An average is a promise about the whole day. The meter only keeps the hour.
Sources
- Großhandelspreise: Day-ahead DE-LU (filter 4169), hourly and daily values — Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, retrieved 05 Nov 2026, 05:15 CET.
- ECB's Lagarde Urges Europe to Boost Climate-Related Insurance, Resilience — Reuters (via Insurance Journal), 04 Nov 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.