German gas-fired generation averaged 3,039 MW on Monday 27 July and 5,730 MW on Friday 31 July, from the energy-charts generation series1. Over the same four sessions German day-ahead daily means ran €116.65/MWh on Tuesday 28 July, €126.29 on Wednesday 29 July, €122.95 on Thursday 30 July and €147.05 on Friday 31 July to mid-morning, with a peak print of €352.36/MWh on 29 July. Wind bottomed out near 2.4 GW in the small hours of Friday. Every price figure here is a daily mean of 15-minute prints from energy-charts, the Fraunhofer ISE service that redistributes Bundesnetzagentur's SMARD market data under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Neither input cost moved. TTF, the Dutch gas benchmark that prices most European wholesale gas, held between €58 and €60 across the window2 after giving back 8% from its January-2023 high. EUA carbon allowances, the permits a fossil generator must surrender per tonne of CO2, drifted in a €79.4 to €82.0 range3. No clean single-day exchange print for EUA was available this window, so treat that level as unconfirmed rather than settled.
Run both legs through the method this desk published on 20 July, a 55 to 58% efficiency band and 0.2 tonnes of CO2 per MWh, on TTF at €59 and EUA at €81. The German clean spark spread comes out at minus €0.52 to plus €5.03 on 30 July and plus €23.58 to plus €29.13 on the morning of 31 July. These are this desk's calculations, not market quotes. A swing of roughly €65 to €70/MWh, on a flat fuel leg and a flat carbon leg, four sessions after the deepest inversion of the cycle.
The consequence sits underground rather than in the generation stack. Through the inversion, gas the turbines would not burn had no competing German buyer at the prompt, and the caverns took it uncontested. A positive spark puts the combined-cycle fleet that sets Germany's marginal price back in the bidding for those same prompt molecules. That quiet subsidy to refill has been withdrawn in the exact week the refill arithmetic says injection needs to nearly triple. Germany's gas plants came within a euro or two of breakeven on 24 July at the war premium's peak and the spark turned positive once before, on 16 July. Both episodes reversed inside days. This one runs into a calendar with three months of injection season left and a third of German cavern volume still empty.
