German day-ahead power cleared €76.97/MWh on Monday 27 July, down 41 per cent from €130.97 on Friday 24 July, while onshore wind rose sevenfold from 2.97 GW to 22.56 GW across the same four sessions.12 Both figures come from SMARD, the German electricity market data platform run under Bundesnetzagentur licence, via the Fraunhofer ISE energy-charts service. Monday's number is the arithmetic mean of 88 of 96 quarter-hourly prints, a partial day.
The fuel leg fell too, but nothing like as far. TTF front-month gas gave back about 8 per cent over the same window. Put both legs through the method this desk published on 20 July, a 55 to 58 per cent efficiency band and 0.2 tCO2 per MWh, and the German clean spark spread now sits between minus €40.42 and minus €45.91/MWh. A week ago the identical calculation returned minus €14.81 to minus €20.37. It reproduces that published figure exactly, which is the reason to trust the new one.
So the deepest inversion of the cycle arrived on cheaper fuel. That inverts the usual reading. When gas spikes and power lags, as it did through the Strait of Hormuz premium that took TTF to €55 in mid-July, the inversion mean-reverts once the fuel shock passes. This one cannot revert on the fuel leg, because the fuel leg has already fallen. It reverts only when the wind drops, and the German cavern operators reached the same conclusion from the storage side on 21 July when prompt injection collapsed.
The counter-argument deserves stating before anyone else states it. 26 July was a Sunday, Monday's figure is incomplete, and a weekend demand trough plus one windy Monday is a thin base for calling anything the worst of a cycle. Two answers. The 20 July comparator was itself a Monday, so the week-on-week move is like-for-like. And this is a claim about where the spread sits now, not a forecast that it stays there.
