SMARD
German electricity market data platform operated under Bundesnetzagentur licence.
SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur's day-ahead price and generation-mix platform, supplied the wind data behind Germany's spark-spread collapse, showing onshore wind climbing sevenfold from 2.97 GW to 22.56 GW between 24 and 27 July 2026.
Last refreshed: 31 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
What made SMARD's wind data the source behind Germany's spark-spread collapse?
Timeline for SMARD
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European Energy MarketsBackground
SMARD, short for Strommarktdaten, is the day-ahead price and generation-mix data platform operated by the Bundesnetzagentur, Germany's federal network regulator. It publishes hourly day-ahead prices, generation output by fuel source and system load, drawing on figures collected from grid operators and power exchanges.
The platform is released under a CC BY 4.0 licence, letting third parties redistribute the same underlying figures through their own interfaces; Fraunhofer ISE's energy-charts.info is one such redistributor, meaning SMARD sits upstream of most public German power-price tools rather than competing with them.
This desk treats SMARD-derived figures, power prices and generation mix, as regulator-sourced, distinct from aggregator-sourced quotes such as TTF gas and EUA carbon prices used elsewhere in its coverage. That distinction is why German and French day-ahead figures in this coverage trace to the regulator rather than to a commercial price vendor.
SMARD data traced the spark-spread swing
SMARD's hourly generation-mix figures showed German onshore wind at a weekly low of 2.97 GW on 24 July, climbing to 14.61 GW on 26 July and 22.56 GW by 27 July, a sevenfold rise. Solar generation held steady across the same days, at 19.58 GW on 24 July and 1.36 GW on 27 July, confirming wind rather than solar drove the price move.
Day-ahead power fell from EUR 130.97/MWh on 24 July, when load ran at 51.66 GW, to EUR 76.97/MWh on 27 July as load eased to 42.88 GW. SMARD's earlier 25 July figures, 18.86 GW of solar into a 44.4 GW load, had already flagged the negative-price quarter-hours as a supply-shape problem rather than a simple oversupply.