German gas plants came within a euro or two of paying their way on 24 July, the Friday the war premium peaked. On day-ahead power at its window high of EUR 130.97/MWh, with TTF near its high and EUA carbon at EUR 83.40/tonne, the clean spark spread printed plus EUR 4.81/MWh at 58 per cent thermal efficiency and minus EUR 1.16 at 55 per cent. 1 2 It is the only near-breakeven reading this desk has calculated all cycle.
German onshore wind ran 2.97 GW that Friday, its weekly low, the same condition that drove German power to EUR 195/MWh at the end of June . 3 The CCGT fleet was called, and for a few hours it was paid for being called.
Keep the number, because it calibrates everything since. On those Friday inputs the fleet's break-even power price sits somewhere around EUR 126 to EUR 132/MWh across the efficiency band. Drop the gas price to Monday's level and that break-even falls to roughly EUR 117 to EUR 123. German day-ahead cleared well under EUR 80. So of the roughly EUR 40 to EUR 46 the spread has lost since Friday, only about EUR 5 came from the fuel side. The rest is the revenue leg, and the revenue leg answers to a weather forecast rather than to a ceasefire.
