Snapshot - 30 July 2026
Gas prices rebounded hard on Wednesday after a fresh round of Middle East escalation restored the risk premium that had been stripped out at the start of the week. UK day-ahead gas jumped by more than 10 p/therm to settle back in the mid-140s p/therm, with front-month and Winter 26 contracts both adding around 6p to trade in a similar range. Continental hubs moved with the UK, TTF day-ahead gaining around €4/MWh. Prices have eased by two to three pence this morning, but the pattern of the past fortnight has been wide daily swings around a rising trend, and Winter 26 gas is now some 35 to 40 per cent above where it started July.
Power was more mixed. Day-ahead baseload eased into the low £120s/MWh and day-ahead peak fell more sharply into the high £100s as strong midday solar output pushed peak prices below baseload, an unusual but seasonally explicable inversion. Forward power followed gas higher, with winter and Q4 contracts firming by £4 to £5/MWh. Behind the daily averages the system was volatile, with prices swinging from below £100/MWh in the morning to above £250/MWh in the evening peak. Weaker wind into early August and a growing list of nuclear outages, including a further planned unit coming off at the end of this week, leave the prompt exposed.
Across the wider complex, oil led the way higher, with Brent recovering close to 8 per cent on the day to sit back in the low $90s/bbl after a sharp slide on Monday. Coal firmed by around 3 per cent, while carbon was almost unchanged, with EU allowances holding in the low €80s/tonne and UK allowances just under £60/tonne, leaving the UK market at a familiar discount. Asian LNG retained a small premium over European gas, keeping cargo competition live at a time when European storage refill is running well behind schedule.
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