Germany day-ahead electricity price and wind power forecast

Forecasting the German electricity price

Germany and Luxembourg form a single bidding zone, so one day-ahead price applies across the whole of it. OpenWindCast forecasts all 24 hours of tomorrow's delivery day, using only information available before the auction closes.

The German day-ahead auction sets one price per hour for the German-Luxembourg bidding zone, and it closes at 12:00 CET for the following delivery day. Every forecast here uses only information that was available before then, and covers all 24 hours, in euro per megawatt hour.

This is the largest and most connected price zone in Europe. Germany is coupled to eleven neighbouring zones, six of them inside the Core flow-based region, where the borders are not simple pipes with fixed limits but a single set of physical constraints solved together. A consequence worth knowing when reading the table: on many hours the German price is set by generation that is not in Germany at all. French nuclear availability, Nordic hydro, Dutch and Danish wind, and how much of any of it can physically reach the German market, all move it.

Germany is also the clearest place in Europe to watch what a very large renewable fleet does to a price. Roughly 100 GW of solar and 70 GW of wind sit against a demand that rarely exceeds 80 GW, so on a bright, breezy spring Sunday there is far more zero-fuel-cost generation available than there is demand to absorb it, and the price goes negative - generators pay to keep running rather than shut down. That is no longer unusual: close to 6 per cent of hours over the last year cleared below zero, and the share has risen every year since 2023. It is a midday phenomenon, driven by solar, and it is followed a few hours later by an evening peak once the sun is gone and the thermal fleet is setting the price again. The daily shape here is not a flat line with two bumps.

Since the last three nuclear reactors closed in April 2023, the units at the top of the German stack are gas, hard coal and lignite. Which of them is on the margin depends on fuel and carbon prices, and that is one of the reasons a day-ahead price in this zone can sit at a very different level from one month to the next while its daily shape stays recognisable.

The auction clears once and the price it sets is final, which is what makes the record on this page possible. Each published forecast is written once and never changed, and the price the auction actually cleared at is placed beside it hour by hour as soon as it settles, including on the days the forecast was wrong. The hours are the CET auction day, which for Germany is also local time, all year round.

The price forecast and the German wind forecast are separate products, scored separately, and each has its own record on this page.

Forecasting wind in Germany

Germany operates the largest onshore wind fleet in Europe, concentrated on the North German Plain. The forecast covers onshore wind in the DE-LU bidding zone and is scored against the day-ahead forecast the four German TSOs publish through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.

The German fleet is both very large and very widely spread, with the heaviest concentrations in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt. Scale of that kind changes the forecasting problem. In a fleet spanning most of a continent-sized country, a weather system that arrives late over one region is often early over another, and those differences partly cancel in the national total. This is why large, dispersed fleets tend to show lower forecast error as a share of capacity than small ones, and it is a property of the fleet rather than of any particular forecaster.

The benchmark

The benchmark is the day-ahead onshore wind forecast published by Germany's four transmission system operators, 50Hertz, Amprion, TenneT and TransnetBW, aggregated for the DE-LU bidding zone and distributed through the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform. It is captured on the day it is published and then held fixed, so the comparison is always against what the market could actually see before the auction closed.

What is published for Germany

One value per day: onshore wind output at 11:00 local time tomorrow, as a load factor and in megawatts. Once the German TSOs' own forecast for that day is published it is captured and held fixed, and once the metered output is settled both forecasts are scored against it. Every day is added to the record above and nothing is removed or rewritten later. How this is measured.