Less demand, a dearer Saturday: the auction that refused to follow the calendar

You would expect a Saturday to be cheap. Factories idle, offices dark, demand down. The auction for Saturday 14 November cleared on Friday, and it says otherwise. Delivery on Saturday will average €197.72 per megawatt hour for Germany and Luxembourg, against €161.74 for Friday¹. Desk arithmetic: that is €35.98, or about 22%, dearer than the day before, and it ends three straight falls since Tuesday’s record €351.48¹.

The forecasters do not expect more demand. SMARD’s forecast puts Saturday’s consumption at about 1,252.8 GWh, against 1,449.3 GWh for Friday². Desk arithmetic: roughly 196 GWh, or 13.6%, less power wanted, and a higher price for it. Something else has to give, and the one public number that would tell us what, Saturday’s wind forecast, had not been published when we checked at 16:32 CET². We will not fill that gap with a guess.

Keep the week in proportion. Saturday’s €197.72 is still €62.11 below the previous Saturday, 7 November, at €259.83¹. Desk arithmetic: about 24% cheaper week on week. One dearer day after a windy fall is a correction in the ledger, not a reversal of it.

Friday was the windy one. The regulator’s forecast for Friday was about 682.1 GWh of onshore wind and 137.4 GWh offshore². Desk arithmetic: 819.5 GWh together, about 1.7 times Thursday’s realised 480 GWh. By 16:00 CET the meters had already logged about 441.1 GWh onshore and 93.5 GWh offshore²: 534.6 GWh in sixteen hours, more than all of Thursday (desk arithmetic). Friday’s cheapest hour, 12:00 to 13:00, cost €90.51¹; its dearest, 17:00 to 18:00, €226.20¹.

Read the hours, not the average. Saturday’s cheapest hour is 12:00 to 13:00 at €146.28; the dearest is 17:00 to 18:00 at €263.37¹. Desk arithmetic: a spread of €117.09 inside one day, wider than the gap between Friday and Saturday’s averages three times over. If you are on a dynamic tariff, the washing machine at lunch and the oven after seven is not lifestyle advice; it is the published price list¹. On a fixed tariff, none of this reaches your bill this week.

Gas had a dear week. In the dark evening hours, gas plants are often the ones bidding, so the fuel’s price is never far from yours. Investing.com reported the Dutch TTF front-month contract up 4.2% to €96.18 per megawatt hour on Friday, locking in a weekly gain of about 12%, after President Trump said Washington no longer needed a deal with Tehran³. The same report notes EU storage at 71% full³. The report calls physical supplies “fundamentally stable” and puts the rise down to a geopolitical risk premium³. You are paying for insurance, not for scarcity.

Oil tells the opposite story. The International Energy Agency’s November Oil Market Report, published on Friday, says global supply rose by 2.3 million barrels a day to 105.4 mb/d in October, and that observed inventories rose by 52 million barrels, the first increase since June⁴. North Sea Dated crude, the agency writes, fell from $136 a barrel on 8 October to around $93 “at the time of writing”⁴. Its balances “suggest that the global oil market will return to a surplus” in the fourth quarter⁴. Brent traded between $95.06 and $97.04 during the London session, per Newsquawk, nudged up by reports that Israel’s spy chief was in Washington⁵.

There is a catch the IEA puts in plain words. Diesel in Europe, at close to $180 a barrel, is still 77% above pre-war levels, and on-land oil stocks are the lowest since at least 2016⁴. Barrels are back on water; they are not yet in your tank.

For you. Three markets, three directions, one Friday: power up for the weekend, gas up for the week, crude drifting lower for the month. None of them was moved by a speech so much as by a forecast, a storage figure and an auction result, each published in public. That is the machinery worth trusting. Nothing here is investment advice.