France May-26 baseload power settled at €21.80/MWh on Tuesday 28 April, against Germany May-26 baseload at €77.55/MWh 1. The €55.75/MWh spread is more than double Kpler's January 2025 record of €27.50 on the same calendar product, the highest forward gap between the two grids that the market has recorded.
EDF's March nuclear output ran at the highest level since 2019 and is still suppressing French forward Continental power into Q2. Germany's May-26 baseload is clearing on a gas-dominated merit order anchored to TTF at around €44/MWh; France's is clearing on a fleet of pressurised water reactors running near nameplate. The Italy-France day-ahead spread hit €153/MWh on 26 April on the same Continental nuclear-surplus dynamic at the cash level. Forward markets have absorbed the May-26 print over a week of trading without significant compression.
France-Germany cross-border physical interconnector capacity runs at roughly 4.8 GW under day-ahead market coupling, the structural bottleneck the headline does not show. Even at full nominal allocation, the cable cannot transfer enough French nuclear surplus to clear into German prices without merit-order shifts in Germany itself. The arbitrage cannot fully clear inside the physical network, so the financial spread persists. For French-sited industrial offtakers, that translates into roughly €56,000 of monthly hedge advantage per MW of load against southern-Germany peers, with knock-on effects on cross-border manufacturing competitiveness in chemicals and metals through Q2-Q3.
The window has a defined close. Flamanville-3, EDF's newest reactor, enters its twelve-month overhaul in September 2026 , removing roughly 1.6 GW of French nuclear at the heating-season cusp. Forward strips that lean on French nuclear past Q3 are pricing through the September calendar, so the spread compression should land before the heating-season buyers do. RTE and CRE auction signals on cross-border interconnector allocation through May become the test of whether regulatory remedy is in scope before the physical fleet shift forces it.
