The France-Germany day-ahead power spread reached a record €96.20/MWh for Monday 8 June delivery, with France at €28.05/MWh against Germany at €124.25/MWh1. That topped the €93.68 record set only five days earlier on 3 June, itself more than double the €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 €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 €28 print, a roughly €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.
