UK Energy Market Report - 8 September 2026

Day-ahead baseload rebounds 75% in one session, peak settles below it for a third time, and all eleven NBP contracts rise together

Monday 7 September undid Friday’s collapse in a single session. UK day-ahead baseload settled at £127.62/MWh, up £54.86 or 75.40% on the day, and day-ahead peak settled at £109.71/MWh, up £64.87 or 144.67%.

Peak is still the cheaper of the two, by £17.91, for a third consecutive session, but the gap has closed from £28.88 on Thursday and £27.92 on Friday. The inversion is compressing, not deepening.

Gas moved the same way and moved everywhere. All eleven NBP contracts settled higher, day-ahead by 3.00p to 182.00p, and the whole board is indicated up again this morning.

Gas Market

NBP day-ahead settled at 182.00 p/therm on Monday 7 September, up 3.00p or 1.68% on the day.

The curve rose with it for a second session running. Oct-26 settled at 182.25p, up 3.44p, Q4-26 at 184.62p, up 3.45p, and Winter-26 at 183.04p, up 3.64p. Q1-27 took the largest move in pence, up 3.82p to 181.42p, and Summer-27 the largest in percentage terms, up 3.27p or 2.73% to 122.99p. Friday had one faller in Summer-28; Monday had none at all, with Summer-28 up 0.88p and Winter-28 up 0.85p.

A miss to own, and it points the opposite way to the last one. Monday’s report published 09:27 indications of 182.99p day-ahead, 183.87p on Winter-26 and 185.59p on Q4-26. Those settled at 182.00p, 183.04p and 184.62p, so the index was around 1p too high across the board. On Friday it was 4.21p too low. Two consecutive sessions wrong in opposite directions is why we timestamp these marks rather than forecast from them.

This morning the index is bullish again. At 09:30 day-ahead was marked at 185.95p, Winter-26 at 186.80p and Q4-26 at 188.39p, each roughly 3.8p above Monday’s settlement. Read those as an indication carrying a timestamp.

Ignore the far end of the curve today. Winter-27 is marked at 126.00p against a settlement of 118.50p, while Winter-28 is marked at 74.09p against 86.19p, which leaves Winter-28 quoted 8.75p below Summer-28 at 82.84p. A winter priced under the summer either side of it is not a view about 2028, it is a thin quote.

The physical system is looser this morning, which cuts against the direction. On a like-for-like 07:00 comparison, demand has fallen 20.26 mcm/day to 88.60, linepack has built 27.54 mcm to 347.34 and Langeled has lifted 5.00 mcm/day to 22.00, with UKCS flat at 79.70. The system opened around 20 mcm/day long, against roughly 7 mcm/day short yesterday. That comparison is rebuilt from yesterday’s published 07:00 figures, because the source’s own day-on-day column is stamped 2pm.

Norwegian supply is the swing factor. Gassco reported unplanned outages on Monday cutting Kollsnes by 15.0 mcm/day, Troll by 9.9 and Asgard by 5.4, with planned maintenance expected to hold total reductions between 68.64 and 86.64 mcm/day for the rest of the week. Flows recovered modestly this morning even as maintenance began at Troll and Kårstø.

Britain is still the cheapest of the seven hubs at 182.00p, and the discount is widening: 2.37p under TTF, 3.70p under Germany’s THE and 14.85p under Italy’s PSV, with France, Spain and Austria in between. On Friday the TTF discount was 1.24p. That is what keeps gas moving out through BBL, covered below.

Electricity Market

The three-session run is the thing to watch. Day-ahead peak has now settled below day-ahead baseload on Thursday, Friday and Monday, by £28.88, £27.92 and £17.91.

The narrowing matters more than the repetition. September daytime solar and wind put peak under baseload in the first place; as the prompt reprices upward, the evening blocks outside the 7am to 7pm window carry more of the average and the gap compresses. At £17.91 it is still a live discount for a daytime-weighted load, and worth checking against how your business electricity contract prices the day.

Yesterday’s indication landed, which is worth recording alongside the misses. This report published a 09:2x day-ahead baseload offer of £128.50 and said it stays an indication until it settles. It settled at £127.62, £0.88 away. The caveat was right to be there and the number happened to be right too; those are different things.

The imbalance market has stopped paying people to consume. Monday is now fully settled at a maximum system buy price of £213.77/MWh at 17:48 and a minimum system sell price of £34.11/MWh at 16:18, after minus £84.88 on Saturday and minus £30.00 on Sunday. The run of negative middays ended exactly as day-ahead rebounded.

Yesterday’s part-day print for Monday was £200.00 and £60.00, and this report said the floor was a number that had not happened yet. It was: the settled maximum came in £13.77 higher and the floor £25.89 lower. Today’s row reads £202.90 and £111.04, covering only the first eighteen settlement periods to roughly 09:00, so treat it the same way.

The forward curve rose across the board, which is a change of shape. On Friday the front fell while Winter-26 and everything behind it rose; on Monday everything rose together. Oct-26 gained £2.43 to £141.78, Nov-26 £2.42 to £151.54, Dec-26 £1.32 to £149.00, Q4-26 £2.05 to £147.40, Winter-26 £1.22 to £146.71 and Winter-27 £1.17 to £100.92. Summer-28 fell a single penny.

This morning day-ahead baseload is offered at £152.50, with Q4-26 at £152.65, Q1-27 at £152.00 and Winter-26 at £151.00. The peak curve is a different story: only Oct-26 at £166.00 carries a meaningful morning offer and the rest are blank, which matches limited power liquidity this morning.

Nuclear is unchanged and it is why the winter contracts hold their bid. Four units totalling 2,530 MW are fully offline: Heysham 2-8 at 660 MW, Torness 1 at 640 MW, Heysham 1-1 at 610 MW and Hartlepool 2 at 620 MW, on planned durations of 80, 19, 17 and 16 days. Behind them sit a 195 MW unplanned reduction at Heysham 1-2 booked for 186 days and a further Heysham 1-1 outage from 28 September for 101 days. None of this comes back inside the Q4 window.

Wind is the near-term risk. Wind and solar are forecast at roughly 13,100 MWh today, peaking near 14,300 MWh tomorrow, then dropping below the seasonal norm of about 10,000 MWh from Thursday 10 September and troughing near 8,750 MWh at the weekend. Some commentary puts the fall a day earlier and pairs it with a 19 mcm/day rise in gas-for-power demand; the forecast chart has it starting on the 10th.

Temperature is not driving any of this. The forecast holds between 14°C and 15°C every day to 15 September, essentially on the seasonal mean. What is moving prices is fuel cost and thermal availability.

Oil, Carbon and Global Commodities

Brent settled higher and has firmed again this morning. Oil is at multi-week highs after Houthi attacks on energy infrastructure and cities in Saudi Arabia that injured more than 70 people, which puts a regional escalation premium back into the price.

Coal was the only faller, with API2 Cal-27 down $1.32 to $133.14/tonne, which partly unwinds Friday’s move. Both LNG markers were completely unchanged, JKM at $25.14/MMBtu and Henry Hub at $2.92/MMBtu. On a day when European gas rose everywhere, an unmoved Asian marker is the more interesting print: the pull on flexible cargoes has not intensified.

The two carbon markets remain far apart. At Monday’s rate of 1.1642, UK ETS Dec-26 at £60.43 is worth about €70.35, a discount of roughly €14.39 to the EUA at €84.74, closed marginally from €14.64 on Friday.

Sterling was unchanged against the euro at 1.1642 and firmed 0.0017 to 1.3538 against the dollar, neither enough to change a UK buyer’s landed cost this week.

One date to note: the French nuclear operator has announced a 24-hour industrial strike beginning Monday 14 September. French nuclear availability sets the floor under continental power prices and feeds back to Britain through the interconnectors.

Storage and Supply Outlook

European storage stands at roughly 66.6% full, up from 65.9% in yesterday’s edition but still well below the same point last year. A 0.7 point build does not close that gap, and the gap is what the winter risk premium is priced on.

The country picture is uneven. Italy is the fullest at 83%, with France and Spain both at 73%, Germany at 54% and Britain at 49%. The two Benelux figures are 49% and 57%; their labels overlap on the source map, so we are not going to guess which of the Netherlands and Belgium holds which.

Britain’s site-level position is the one to look at. Rough is at zero and so is Humbly Grove. The working stock sits in Stublach at 76%, HolFord at 75%, Holehouse Farm at 70% and Hornsea at 57%, with Aldbrough at 50% and Hill Top at 22%. On the LNG side South Hook is 64% full, Dragon 33% and Isle of Grain 31%.

Ten cargoes are scheduled into northwest European terminals between today and 16 September, around 988 mcm, nine of them US-origin and one from Peru. Only one is booked into a UK terminal: 96 mcm into Milford Haven on 15 September. Yesterday’s report noted a US cargo expected in the UK next week; it now has a date and a volume.

UK sendout is running at 8.10 mcm/day, South Hook at 4.90 and Isle of Grain at 3.20, with Dragon idle. That is up 0.80 mcm/day on yesterday and is part of why the system opened long.

Britain is still exporting through BBL, at 11.48 mcm/day into the Netherlands, narrowed from 15.68 at the same hour yesterday. The Belgian interconnector is idle on its outage, which is concentrating UK exports through BBL and tightening the wider northwest European balance.

A country 49% full, with its largest seasonal site empty, exporting gas in September because its hub is the cheapest in Europe, is a fair summary of why the forward curve will not follow the prompt down.

What This Means for Your Business

Two sessions have now moved day-ahead baseload by -23.31% and then +75.40%. Anyone who took a view from Friday’s screen had it reversed inside one working day.

That is the argument against treating a single morning as a buying signal. At this level of volatility what matters is how you split the volume, not which day you press the button, which is what a tranche-based purchasing strategy exists to handle.

The numbers to plan around are Winter-26 at 183.04 p/therm and £146.71/MWh. Both rose again on Monday, and both have now risen on each of the last two sessions, including the one where day-ahead collapsed 23%. Nothing in the last week has improved a 2026/27 winter renewal.

The number that should shape a longer decision is Winter-27, at 118.50 p/therm and £100.92/MWh, which is 64.54p cheaper on gas and £45.79 cheaper on power than the winter in front of us. The market is charging a large premium for the winter you cannot avoid and much less for the one after it, which is the case for looking past a straight twelve-month renewal.

For sites with heavy daytime load, three consecutive peak-below-baseload settlements are a pattern rather than a curiosity, but a narrowing one: £28.88 on Thursday, £17.91 on Monday. If you are going to act on it, the window is visibly closing.

If you want to know what these movements mean for your own contract dates and consumption profile, speak to one of our energy consultants today.

Previous report: UK Energy Market Report – 7 September 2026