Snapshot - 08 September 2026
Wholesale gas and power both moved higher again on Monday, and the driver was supply rather than weather. Renewed conflict in the Gulf over the weekend, a heavy schedule of Norwegian outages and European storage sitting well behind its four-year average pushed the whole gas complex up by around 3 pence per therm across the prompt and the curve. Winter 26 gas is now trading at levels not seen in any front-season contract since January 2023, having climbed roughly 30 per cent since the start of August with very little given back along the way.
Power followed gas higher. Forward contracts for the coming winter firmed by one to two pounds per megawatt hour, held up by expensive fuel, a firmer carbon price and a UK nuclear fleet running with close to 2.5 gigawatts of capacity offline into the autumn. The prompt was volatile rather than simply expensive: strong afternoon wind briefly dropped system prices into the £30s per megawatt hour before the evening ramp lifted them above £200, a swing that says more about the thinness of the thermal margin than about the level of demand.
Elsewhere, crude firmed and has extended into multi-week highs this morning after an attack on Saudi energy infrastructure, while coal drifted slightly lower. Carbon added to the upward pressure on power, with both the European and UK schemes settling higher and the gap between them broadly unchanged. Sterling moved little against either the euro or the dollar. The near-term direction now rests on whether the Gulf situation stabilises and whether Norwegian flows recover as maintenance rolls off.
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