€345.64 for Monday: the dearest day of the year, and a wind forecast a sixth of Wednesday's

The day-ahead auction for Monday 9 November cleared at a German-Luxembourg daily average of €345.64 per megawatt hour, the SMARD series shows¹. That is the highest delivery day of 2026 on the series, above the €314.85 of Thursday 29 October, and €103.51 more than Sunday’s €242.13 (Desk arithmetic)¹. A year earlier, on 9 November 2025, the same series stood at €99.00¹.

The shape. The cheapest hour is 03:00 at €223.27. Prices climb after 06:00, reach €400.91 at 08:00, sag to about €315 over lunch, then jump: €526.12 at 16:00, €644.18 at 17:00, €566.58 at 18:00¹. In quarter-hours the extreme is €653.38 at 17:15¹. Desk arithmetic: the four evening hours from 16:00 to 20:00 average €553.29, and the gap between the cheapest and dearest hour is €420.91 per megawatt hour, or about 42 cents a kilowatt hour on the wholesale leg alone.

The reason. SMARD’s own generation forecast for Monday puts onshore and offshore wind together at about 71.6 gigawatt hours for the whole day, against about 416.9 GWh forecast for Wednesday 4 November (Desk arithmetic, from²). Roughly a sixth of the wind, in the week the heating season gets serious. Euronews describes the pattern as Europe’s first “Dunkelflaute” of the season, with cloudy, windless weather pushing the grid towards gas-fired reserve plants³.

For you. Most households pay a fixed tariff and will not see Monday on their bill; the auction sets the wholesale leg, and taxes, levies and grid fees sit on top. If you are on a dynamic tariff, today’s curve is unusually blunt: the small hours are the least bad, and the 16:00–20:00 block is the one to avoid for the washing machine, the dryer and the car charger¹. The useful habit is a dull one: the next day’s prices are published every afternoon, free, by a federal agency. Nothing here is investment advice.