01When does power move?
The Spread: the gap between the cheapest and dearest hour
How wide is the gap each day between the cheapest and most expensive hour of electricity?
Electricity has a price every hour of the day. Over the 12 months to 14 October 2026, the gap between the cheapest and dearest hour of the German day averaged €142/MWh.
A battery buying every day's cheapest hour and selling its dearest would have earned about €98 855 per MW of capacity over the same period, an upper bound that assumes perfect foresight, no round-trip losses and no price impact; real batteries earn less.
Prices went below zero in 485 hours of the same period.
What the gap between hours measures
The wholesale price of electricity is set in an auction held the day before delivery. Until October 2025 it set one price for each hour of the next day, and since then it sets one for each quarter-hour. On a calm, cloudy day the prices sit close together. On a sunny, windy day the midday prices can fall to almost nothing, or below zero, while the evening after sunset stays expensive. The daily spread is the distance between the day's cheapest and dearest hour; battery traders call it TB1, short for top-bottom one.
Storage earns its money from that spread. A battery, a pumped-storage reservoir or an electric car that can wait buys power in the cheap hour and uses or sells it in the dear one, so a wider spread means a bigger reward for moving power through time. People planning batteries watch it closely for that reason.
The revenue figure beside it is the most a 1 MW battery could have earned from these prices. As more batteries trade the same pattern, they narrow the spread they all trade on. Flexibility applies the same arithmetic to a household's car or heat pump, and Storage tracks how fast grid batteries are arriving.
Wattlas averages each day's quarter-hour prices to hours so that the years before and after October 2025 compare. The second chart counts the hours below zero each month.
Questions
What is the daily electricity price spread in Germany?
Over the 12 months to 14 October 2026, the gap between the cheapest and dearest hour of the German day averaged €142/MWh.
How these numbers are made: The canonical hourly grid, The daily spread (TB1 and TB2), The perfect-foresight arbitrage bound.
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