Snapshot - 23 October 2026
Wholesale gas and power prices pushed higher again into Thursday’s close and have accelerated further this morning. The move was driven by a genuine tightening of supply rather than by sentiment alone: Norwegian flows were curtailed by unplanned maintenance, European LNG arrivals fell by roughly half against the month’s average, and colder weather triggered Europe’s first net storage withdrawal of the winter. UK day-ahead gas settled in the low 220s in pence per therm and the continental benchmark cleared €90/MWh for the first time in almost four years, with front-month contracts reaching the strongest levels of the week this morning.
Power followed gas higher across the curve, with winter contracts in the £170s per MWh and January the dearest point of the strip in the high £180s. Nuclear availability weakened on both sides of the Channel, with a fresh unplanned outage in the UK and a material downgrade to French availability for the rest of October, which limits the scope for imports to cover UK evening peaks. The prompt behaved very differently from the curve. Thursday’s half-hourly system price ran the full range from zero in the early hours to above £250/MWh in the evening ramp, with a deep collapse through the afternoon, and imbalance volumes swung by more than 2,000 MWh inside a single ninety-minute window.
Across the wider complex, Brent settled above $113/bbl and has since traded above $114/bbl, close to its high for the year, as attacks extended to Saudi energy infrastructure and hopes of US-Iran diplomacy faded. Carbon firmed slightly, with EU allowances in the mid-€80s per tonne and UK allowances in the low £60s, and coal was flat. The structural point for buyers is that European storage has entered the heating season roughly fifteen percentage points below its five-year norm, and the forward curve is now carrying a visible premium to rebuild it next summer. Contracts beyond 2027 fall away sharply, which is the market’s own statement that it does not expect today’s pricing to last.
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