LinkedIn·Tuesday, 11 August 2026·15d ago
Some weeks ago I wrote here that the price per megawatt hour is one of the least complete numbers in energy. The average tells you what…
Nina Waffenschmidt
CEO at PerPetum Energy
Some weeks ago I wrote here that the price per megawatt hour is one of the least complete numbers in energy. The average tells you what power costs on paper. The peaks, and the hours below zero, tell you what it costs in practice.
The reaction kept coming back to one question. Fine, but where do we actually see that?
From this week, on our own website (link in the first comment). We built our Energy Market Monitor in-house: Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany, in quarter-hour resolution, refreshed daily. Day ahead and average prices are the easy part. The views I would look at first sit further down. Negative price hours against the average price, which shows how often the market pays a site to stop drawing power. The price spread within a day, the best short proxy for what flexibility is worth. The PV capture price, which shows what a solar profile is actually worth on the day-ahead market. And the value of curtailment, which puts a figure in euro per megawatt-hour on what that same profile gains by switching off during the hours that price below zero.
Publishing that openly is a deliberate choice. These curves are not abstract market news. They set what an industrial site pays for every quarter-hour it runs. The gap between the cheap hours and the expensive ones is now wide enough to move a margin. A company that reads that gap, and shifts consumption or storage against it, simply competes at a lower energy cost. We would rather more industrial companies could see it, including the ones who never become our clients.
The part I like most is where it came from. A colleague planted the idea in March. A small team picked it up, built it themselves, and this week it went live.
Have a look, link in the comments. If you check one thing, look at Belgium this year.
The day-ahead average is € 97.90/MWh. A solar profile captures € 51.70 of it. Curtailing during the negative hours puts € 4.37 back. Forecast error, a cloud where you nominated sun, takes € 7.30 off. Which leaves € 48.77, against a market that averaged € 97.90.
Four numbers, one megawatt hour. That is what I meant by incomplete.
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