The France-Germany day-ahead power spread reached a record EUR 96.20/MWh for Monday 8 June delivery, with France at EUR 28.05/MWh against Germany at EUR 124.25/MWh 1. That topped the EUR 93.68 record set only five days earlier on 3 June , itself more than double the EUR 46.58 the spread reached on 21 May . Sunday weekend renewables had cleared both markets far lower, so Monday's demand return exposed the structural gap rather than a one-off weather print.
France dispatched a nuclear fleet near zero short-run marginal cost on Monday while Germany set price on a carbon-burdened gas stack above EUR 124, so the gap is plant mix rather than weather. Since CRE switched France from ARENH to VNU in January , the advantage passes straight through. CRE is the Commission de Regulation de l'Energie, France's energy regulator; ARENH was the legacy regulated nuclear-access scheme, and VNU, the Valorisation de la Nucleaire, is the volume-based mechanism that replaced it. French industrial buyers now pay close to the EUR 28 print, a roughly EUR 96/MWh day-ahead cost advantage over German peers landing at the factory gate.
EDF takes Flamanville-3, its 1.65 GW EPR reactor declared commercial on 5 May, into a one-year overhaul from September, pulling 1.6 GW of that nuclear cushion precisely as heating demand returns and dating the reversal point . Every compression of this spread through the series has been a low-demand artefact that reverses on the next working-day print; the trend is widening, not mean-reverting.
