€199.05 for Thursday: a third off in one auction

Thursday’s electricity was auctioned on Wednesday, and it came out cheap by the standards of this fortnight. The German-Luxembourg day-ahead price for delivery on Thursday 12 November averages €199.05 per megawatt hour, against €316.65 for Wednesday and a record €351.48 for Tuesday¹. Desk arithmetic: that is €117.60, or about 37.1%, below Wednesday, and the lowest delivery day since €155.12 on Tuesday 27 October¹.

The cheapest hour became the average. Wednesday’s cheapest hour, 03:00, cleared at €200.39¹. Thursday’s whole-day average is below that. Desk arithmetic: 14 of Thursday’s 24 hours clear below Wednesday’s best hour. The cheapest is 23:00 at €140.25; the dearest is 08:00 at €244.82¹. Wednesday’s dearest hour, 17:00, cost €447.65¹. On Thursday the same hour costs €222.30.

The evening lost its sting. This is the part that matters for a household. Thursday’s four evening hours from 16:00 to 19:00 clear between €199.19 and €225.65¹; on Wednesday every one of them was above €390. Desk arithmetic: Thursday’s evening averages about €215.79. The country still cooks, heats and charges at teatime; on Thursday it will simply pay less for doing so.

What we do not know yet. SMARD’s generation forecast for Thursday had not been published when we checked; its latest wind figures still end with Wednesday, when onshore and offshore together were forecast at about 148.1 GWh². So you should treat any confident story about why Thursday is cheaper with care until the forecast is out. An auction result is a fact. An explanation offered before the data is a guess.

For you. On a fixed tariff, a single cheap day changes nothing on this month’s bill. On a dynamic tariff, Thursday is the friendliest day of the week so far: the late evening from 21:00 clears between €140.25 and €165.39¹, so that is the window for the washing machine and the car. And €199.05 is still about 20 cents a kilowatt hour before grid fees and taxes, not a bargain. Nothing here is investment advice.