Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
Iran Conflict 2026
23AUG

Friday's German spark briefly broke even

2 min read
19:02UTC

At the top of the war premium the German clean spark spread printed plus EUR 4.81/MWh at 58 per cent efficiency and minus EUR 1.16 at 55 per cent. It was the only near-breakeven print of the cycle.

← Back to A $22.9bn missile order, and a hunger rowJump to analysis ↓
ConflictAssessed
Key takeaway

Friday's near-breakeven print sets the fleet's break-even power price near EUR 126 to EUR 132/MWh.

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.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

For one day only, on Friday 24 July, a German gas power station could just about break even, or make a tiny profit, running flat out. That happened because the price of electricity was unusually high that day, at the same time as very little wind was blowing. As soon as the wind picked back up over the following weekend, that brief window closed, and gas plants went back to losing money on every unit they generated.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

The near-breakeven window existed only because three inputs peaked together for one session: TTF near its cycle high, EUA at its cycle high, and German onshore wind at its weekly low of 2.97 GW, removing the cheap-renewables competition that normally caps the price gas-fired plant can capture.

Any one of those three easing, which is what happened within 72 hours, removes the condition entirely; the breakeven was never a new floor for the fleet's economics, it was three separate extremes landing on the same day.

What could happen next?
  • Meaning

    The 24 July near-breakeven print required three separate extremes (peak gas, peak carbon, weekly-low wind) to align, which is why it lasted a single session rather than becoming a sustained condition.

Sources:SMARD / Bundesnetzagentur via Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts·Investing.com
Mentions:Germany →TTF →EUA →CCGT →EDF →
First Reported In

Update #30 · Wind, not peace, sank the German spark

SMARD / Bundesnetzagentur via Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts· 27 Jul 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
This Event
Friday's German spark briefly broke even
Friday's print fixes the fleet's break-even power price, which is the number every later spread reading is measured against.
Led to
German gas plants back in profit
German gas plants had already come close to break-even at the 24 July war-premium peak before this positive spark.
Occurred 30 Jul 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
Hizballah
Hizballah
Has not commented on the US Treasury's 20 August designation of ten people, including named couriers, over a cash network Treasury says moved money to it from the IRGC-Qods Force. ACLED recorded a sharp rise in attacks around it the same day.
Kuwait
Kuwait
Kuwait's Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Khaled al-Shriaan, co-chaired the 16th US-Kuwait Joint Military Commission at the Pentagon on 21 August. Kuwait has not published what was agreed; only a summary of the meeting's existence and attendees is sourced.
Qatar
Qatar
Has not commented publicly on the $4.5bn KC-46A tanker Foreign Military Sale notification the State Department approved on 20 August. The notification opens a sale process; Doha has not confirmed whether it will proceed to a signed transfer.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
Told a Baghdad business meeting on 20 August that Iran will not endure a hungry population regardless of its military strength, against 87.9% point-to-point inflation and 128.1% food inflation for Tir. His fellow Majlis Economic Committee member Samsami separately warned a petrol price rise would ignite unrest.
US Navy
US Navy
Signed a $22.9bn, seven-year contract with Raytheon on 17 August to raise Tomahawk output from about 60 a year to more than 1,000. The Acting Navy Secretary, quoted via an X post, framed it as the "Arsenal of Freedom" initiative; it replaces the 850 missiles fired by 1 April in about ten months at the new rate.
UK Maritime Trade Operations
UK Maritime Trade Operations
UKMTO logged six armed men boarding a tanker 136 nautical miles east of Al Mukalla on 20 August and redirecting it toward Somalia. A vessel steered toward the Somali coast reads as an attempted seizure, a distinct hazard from the stand-off strikes the same lane has seen before.