Electricity in Germany
Where Germany’s electricity is coming from right now, what it costs, and how much of it crosses the borders. The data comes from SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s electricity market data platform, from Fraunhofer ISE’s Energy-Charts, from Verivox and from Battery-Charts. How current it is varies a great deal by section: from about an hour for generation and cross-border flows to several months for the battery figures. Each section therefore states its own reference time.
Generation, consumption & batteries
Electricity generation by source in the most recent fully reported 15-minute interval, together with the load. The share refers to generation, not to consumption (see the country comparison).
As of 18 Sept 2026, 11:00
Our batteries could absorb surplus electricity and cushion both peaks and troughs. But a slow smart-meter roll-out, little-used dynamic tariffs and complicated rules are holding that potential back.
On 27 March 2026 the Bundesnetzagentur opened 77 supervisory proceedings against metering point operators over delays in the smart-meter roll-out. Press release (in German)
›24-hour history
The coloured areas show generation by source, stacked to the total. The dashed line is the load, i.e. consumption. Where the line is above the areas, Germany is consuming more electricity in that quarter-hour than it generates; the difference comes from imports or from storage. Where it is below, the surplus is exported or stored.
The source is SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s electricity market data platform, which publishes the transmission operators’ reports within about an hour. Not all series arrive at the same time, so the interval shown is the most recent quarter-hour for which all generation types and the load are available (11:00), not the very latest timestamp. Solar, wind, hydro, biomass and “other renewables” (mainly geothermal plus landfill and sewage gas) count as renewable; pumped storage (storage, not primary energy) and “other conventional” (oil, coke-oven and blast-furnace gas, waste, among others) do not. Sources at exactly 0 MW are not shown. The bars above show two different physical quantities: power in GW on the left (how fast electricity is flowing right now), energy in GWh on the right (how much a battery holds). A GWh figure is therefore not “bigger” than a GW figure; they become comparable only through how long the batteries could bridge the current difference between generation and consumption (GWh ÷ GW). That difference is sometimes a surplus, sometimes a shortfall — the batteries could balance either, so its absolute value is used. It becomes very small at times during the day, so values above 99 h are shown as “> 99 h”. All bars are scaled with the load as 100%. The battery figures come from Battery-Charts (ISEA and PGS, RWTH Aachen University) and are based on the Bundesnetzagentur’s Marktstammdatenregister; as of 2026-09. They describe installed capacity, not the current state of charge: none of these sources publishes how much is actually available right now.
Imports & exports
Physical electricity flows across the interconnectors. An arrow pointing inwards is an import into Germany, an arrow pointing outwards an export.
As of 18 Sept 2026, 11:15
Imports
1,219 MW
sum of all inflows
Exports
4,667 MW
sum of all outflows
Net
+3,448 MW
Germany is a net exporter
By border
- Norway+1,419 MW
- Belgium+880 MW
- Austria+865 MW
- Switzerland+620 MW
- France−470 MW
- Poland+410 MW
- Sweden−408 MW
- Luxembourg+351 MW
- Netherlands−333 MW
- Denmark+123 MW
- Czechia−8 MW
Positive values are exports from Germany, negative values imports.
Shown are physical flows — the electricity actually moving over the lines — not the commercial trading schedules, which can differ. The source is SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s electricity market data platform, which publishes the transmission operators’ reports within about an hour. The interval shown is the most recent quarter-hour for which all regularly reporting borders are in; a border that has not reported for hours appears as “—”. Norway and Sweden do not border Germany; they are connected by the NordLink and Baltic Cable subsea links and are therefore included.
Household electricity price
What households pay per kilowatt-hour, including grid fees, levies, taxes and the supplier’s margin. For an annual consumption of 4,000 kWh.
As of September 2026
When switching supplier
24.98 ct/kWh
average of new-customer tariffs · daily values to 16 Sept 2026
Average across all households
33.38 ct/kWh
including legacy contracts
Saving from switching
8.40 ct/kWh
about €336 a year at 4,000 kWh
Monthly values since 2021
The switching price is −8.0% against the same month a year earlier.
Source: Verivox electricity price index, household with 4,000 kWh annual consumption. “When switching supplier” is the average of the tariffs new customers can currently sign up to; “average across all households” includes existing contracts and default supply, which are usually dearer. The difference between the two lines is what switching saves. The switching price is the monthly mean of a figure Verivox publishes daily; the current month is accordingly a mean of the days so far. The annual amount is rounded and applies to 4,000 kWh a year. The wholesale price in the next section is a different quantity and considerably lower, because it contains no grid fees, levies or taxes.
Wholesale electricity price
The wholesale price in day-ahead trading for the DE-LU bidding zone: the price at which electricity is traded on the exchange. It contains neither grid fees nor levies, taxes or the supplier’s margin, and is therefore well below the household price in the previous section.
Prices to 19 Sept 2026, 23:00
Current hour
0.14 €/MWh
30-day mean
139.50 €/MWh
Highest daily mean
699.44 €/MWh
on 26 Aug 2022
Today, hour by hour
Cheapest 3 hours: 13:00–16:00 ⌀ 1.06 €/MWh
Dearest 3 hours: 06:00–09:00 ⌀ 200.79 €/MWh
Weekly means since February 2022
Highest weekly mean in the series: 585.92 €/MWh in the week of 22 Aug to 28 Aug 2022, the peak of the gas price crisis. Drag the slider or scroll inside the chart to zoom into a period.
Figures in euros per megawatt-hour (€/MWh); 100 €/MWh is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The values in the hourly chart are means of the four quarter-hour products: since the switch to quarter-hourly market time units, the exchange publishes 96 prices a day instead of 24. Negative prices are possible and real; they occur when a lot of wind and solar meets low demand. Gas prices, CO₂ certificates and grid fees are not part of this data source and are deliberately not shown here.
Renewable share compared across countries
Renewable share of electricity consumption (load): the bar is the mean of the last 365 days, the dot the most recent daily value. This is a different quantity from the share of generation further up; the two numbers do not agree and are not meant to.
Reference day: 16 Sept 2026
The reference quantity is consumption, not generation: values above 100% are therefore possible and correct — they mean that on that day more renewable electricity was generated than the country consumed, with the surplus exported or stored. The annual mean is a mean of daily values in which every day counts equally regardless of its load, so it sits a little above the energy-weighted annual share. 365 days rather than “year to date”, so that every season is included once and the countries stay comparable on any date. For Germany the reference day is 16 Sept 2026. Countries report at different speeds, so the reference days can be a day or two apart; each bar’s own day is in its tooltip. For every country the most recent available daily value is shown.