German market update, 2026 so far and what to look out for (but perhaps not forward to).
Day-ahead, ID-AEP, reserve capacity and the aFRR bid curve.
We haven’t done market updates for a while... let’s restart the habit, building on new workflows and better datasets. Thank you to a reader for letting me know that you have missed the market views. Unprecedented reader activity recently, and I went down a few rabbit holes motivated by side conversations. Welcome to all recent new subscribers, and thank you to all subscribers for being part of the conversation! The usual request: if you spot mistakes, have better interpretations, or would like to point out some missing context, please get in touch. The aim is to keep building useful perspectives for richer conversation.
This post will funnel us from an overview of the year so far to a view of the current week in context, and we’ll end by looking forward. The familiar box-plot will be useful as ever: it tells us whether the middle moved, whether the lower tail opened, whether the upper tail stayed alive, and whether the current situation is sitting inside a familiar distribution or outside it.
We want to look at the whole market banquet, not just the individual dishes.
To support all of this we take advantage of data-source and pipeline developments over the last weeks. To highlight one example yet again, we had run into a wall with ID related measures like SPARX because the daily overview data published by EPEX is not suited for regular use.
The re-discovery of ID-AEP has opened up all options again. ID-AEP gives us a perfectly suited realised-price trace of the continuous ID market.
Before zooming into 2026, it helps to step back into 2025.
