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3AUG

German gas plants back in profit

4 min read
10:53UTC

German gas-fired output ran a 3,039 MW mean on 27 July and a 5,730 MW mean on 31 July as day-ahead power reached EUR 147.05/MWh, flipping the clean spark spread from breakeven into clear profit on a fuel leg that never moved.

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EconomicAssessed
Key takeaway

A positive spark spread puts German turbines back in the prompt gas market against storage operators.

German gas-fired generation averaged 3,039 MW on Monday 27 July and 5,730 MW on Friday 31 July, from the energy-charts generation series 1. Over the same four sessions German day-ahead daily means ran EUR 116.65/MWh on Tuesday 28 July, EUR 126.29 on Wednesday 29 July, EUR 122.95 on Thursday 30 July and EUR 147.05 on Friday 31 July to mid-morning, with a peak print of EUR 352.36/MWh on 29 July. Wind bottomed out near 2.4 GW in the small hours of Friday. Every price figure here is a daily mean of 15-minute prints from energy-charts, the Fraunhofer ISE service that redistributes Bundesnetzagentur's SMARD market data under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Neither input cost moved. TTF, the Dutch gas benchmark that prices most European wholesale gas, held between EUR 58 and EUR 60 across the window 2 after giving back 8% from its January-2023 high . EUA carbon allowances, the permits a fossil generator must surrender per tonne of CO2, drifted in a EUR 79.4 to EUR 82.0 range 3. No clean single-day exchange print for EUA was available this window, so treat that level as unconfirmed rather than settled.

Run both legs through the method this desk published on 20 July, a 55 to 58% efficiency band and 0.2 tonnes of CO2 per MWh, on TTF at EUR 59 and EUA at EUR 81. The German clean spark spread comes out at minus EUR 0.52 to plus EUR 5.03 on 30 July and plus EUR 23.58 to plus EUR 29.13 on the morning of 31 July. These are this desk's calculations, not market quotes. A swing of roughly EUR 65 to EUR 70/MWh, on a flat fuel leg and a flat carbon leg, four sessions after the deepest inversion of the cycle .

The consequence sits underground rather than in the generation stack. Through the inversion, gas the turbines would not burn had no competing German buyer at the prompt, and the caverns took it uncontested . A positive spark puts the combined-cycle fleet that sets Germany's marginal price back in the bidding for those same prompt molecules. That quiet subsidy to refill has been withdrawn in the exact week the refill arithmetic says injection needs to nearly triple. Germany's gas plants came within a euro or two of breakeven on 24 July at the war premium's peak and the spark turned positive once before, on 16 July . Both episodes reversed inside days. This one runs into a calendar with three months of injection season left and a third of German cavern volume still empty.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Gas-fired power stations only run when it is profitable to burn gas rather than sell it, or store it, instead. That profitability, the "spark spread", swung from roughly breakeven to strongly profitable in about a day, because wind power collapsed and electricity prices jumped while the price of gas itself stayed flat. That means German gas plants started running much harder, generation nearly doubling, at the same time storage operators are trying to buy gas to fill their caverns, so the two are now bidding against each other for the same supply.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

The structural cause of the flip is mechanical: German gas-fired generation rose from a 3,039 MW mean on 27 July to 5,730 MW by 31 July precisely because the clean spark spread crossed from roughly breakeven into strongly positive territory, and CCGTs are dispatched ahead of storage injection whenever burning gas for power pays better than holding it underground.

That dispatch order is itself the root cause of the competition described in this update's storage arithmetic : during the negative-spread period from 20 to 29 July, caverns had an uncontested bid for prompt gas because CCGTs were off-merit; the moment the spread turned positive, that uncontested run ended, meaning storage refill and gas-fired generation are now drawing on the same pool of prompt supply rather than operating in sequence.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    CCGTs and storage operators bidding for the same prompt gas at a positive spark spread could slow the injection pace this update already flags as too slow for the 1 November target (ID:1, this update).

  • Meaning

    Repeated short-duration spark spread inversions this cycle suggest German day-ahead pricing is now more sensitive to wind variability than to the underlying gas price, at least while TTF and EUA hold flat.

Sources:Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts (redistributing Bundesnetzagentur SMARD under CC BY 4.0)·Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts (redistributing Bundesnetzagentur SMARD under CC BY 4.0)·Barchart and Tradingpedia
Mentions:Germany →Fraunhofer ISE →TTF →EUA →Bundesnetzagentur →ERCOT →SMARD →Texas →
First Reported In

Update #31 · Caverns restart, 21 points short of November

Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts (redistributing Bundesnetzagentur SMARD under CC BY 4.0)· 31 Jul 2026
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Causes and effects
Caused by
German spark spread hits cycle worst
The wind collapse of 28-31 July reversed the sevenfold wind surge that had driven German day-ahead down 41 percent on 27 July.
Occurred 26 Jul 2026
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German gas plants priced out of merit
The clean spark spread flipped positive, reversing the negative spread recorded on 20 July when gas and carbon costs outpaced power.
Occurred 19 Jul 2026
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German power climbs to EUR 156, spark flips
16 July was the prior occasion the spark turned positive, on heat demand under a heat dome rather than on this wind collapse; this is the third such inversion-to-recovery cycle.
Occurred 16 Jul 2026
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TTF breaks 8% off a three-year high
TTF's 8 percent give-back from its January-2023-high left the fuel leg flat, so the spark's swing back to positive came entirely from the power leg.
Occurred 26 Jul 2026
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German gas plants ignore cheaper fuel
Gas turbines returning to bid for prompt gas reverses the fall in German gas-fired generation recorded on 27 July.
Occurred 26 Jul 2026
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Friday's German spark briefly broke even
German gas plants had already come close to break-even at the 24 July war-premium peak before this positive spark.
Occurred 23 Jul 2026
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Clean spark spread reaches EUR 74
The clean spark spread reached EUR 74 on 30 June in an earlier inversion-to-recovery cycle; this is the same metric recurring at a later point in the same cycle.
Occurred 30 Jun 2026
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This Event
German gas plants back in profit
Turbines that had left the prompt gas market to the caverns are now bidding against them, in the week refill needs to nearly triple.
Led to
France follows Germany as spread narrows
French day-ahead prices rose in step with the German wind-driven surge, though by a smaller margin.
Occurred 30 Jul 2026
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Different Perspectives
Cross-border power traders
Cross-border power traders
The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.
EDF
EDF
River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.
Gasunie
Gasunie
TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.
German gas-fired generators
German gas-fired generators
Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.
European Commission (DG Energy)
European Commission (DG Energy)
Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.
Spain's LNG terminal operators
Spain's LNG terminal operators
Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.