UK Energy Market Report - 9 September 2026

NBP day-ahead settles at a multi-year high, day-ahead power adds 21%, and Brent trades above 100 dollars for the first time since July

Tuesday 8 September took the UK gas curve to a multi-year high. NBP day-ahead settled at 189.25 p/therm, up 7.25p or 3.98% on the day, and every contract out to Winter-27 went with it.

Power moved further. Day-ahead baseload settled at £154.45/MWh, up £26.83 or 21.02%, and day-ahead peak at £152.84/MWh, up £43.13 or 39.31%. All eleven baseload contracts and all eleven peak contracts rose.

The driver is no longer the weather. Brent settled at $97.92/barrel and traded above $100 this morning for the first time since 24 July, on a sharp escalation between Iran and the United States set out below.

Gas Market

At 189.25 p/therm, Tuesday’s day-ahead is the highest settlement this report has carried.

The near curve moved as a block and moved less than the prompt. Oct-26 settled at 188.80p, up 6.55p, Q4-26 at 191.08p, up 6.46p, Winter-26 at 189.40p, up 6.36p and Q1-27 at 187.68p, up 6.26p, a band of 3.4% to 3.6%. Summer-27 added 3.69p to 126.68p and Winter-27 3.21p to 121.71p.

The far end stopped following. Summer-28 slipped 0.01p to 78.72p and Winter-28 fell 0.38p to 85.82p, the first fallers on this board since 3 September. A curve that rises hard at the front and gives ground in 2028 is pricing a supply problem with an end date, not a permanent repricing.

Yesterday’s indications came in low, which is the opposite of the previous session’s error. This report published 09:30 marks of 185.95p day-ahead, 186.80p on Winter-26 and 188.39p on Q4-26. Those settled at 189.25p, 189.40p and 191.08p, so the index was 3.30p, 2.60p and 2.69p under. On Monday the same index was around 1p over. Two sessions, two directions, which is why these carry a timestamp rather than a forecast.

This morning the index is higher again. At 09:32 day-ahead was marked at 196.07p, Winter-26 at 196.93p and Q4-26 at 198.77p, each roughly 7.5p above Tuesday’s settlement. Read those as an indication with a stamp on it, not as where the day closes.

Yesterday’s far-curve warning was worth making. This report dismissed a 74.09p morning mark on Winter-28 as a thin quote; it settled at 85.82p, so the mark was out by 11.73p. Today the same contract is marked at 97.99p, up 12.17p on a settlement that fell. Ignore it again.

The physical system is tighter than the price rise alone would suggest. On a like-for-like 07:00 comparison against the figures this report published yesterday, demand is 16.63 mcm/day higher at 105.23, linepack is 12.74 mcm lower at 334.60 and UKCS production is 1.90 higher at 81.60. Langeled is flat at 22.00 and LNG sendout is flat at 8.10, South Hook 4.90 and Isle of Grain 3.20, with Dragon idle.

Norwegian flows into Britain are the number to watch. The 07:00 table has Vesterled and Flags at 4.00 mcm/day against 14.00 on the source’s own previous column, which is stamped 2pm, so take the 10.00 mcm/day fall as direction rather than a clean day-on-day print. Gassco exit nominations are 294.8 mcm/day with no new maintenance starting and UK-bound flows nominated 1 mcm/day higher through FLAGS. The table and the commentary disagree, and they are stamped at different hours.

Britain is the cheapest of the seven European hubs again, but only just. NBP settled at 189.25p against Spain’s PVB at 189.26p, one hundredth of a penny behind, with France’s PEG at 191.39p, TTF at 192.09p, Germany’s THE at 193.00p, Austria’s VTP at 196.06p and Italy’s PSV dearest at 205.55p. The discount to TTF widened to 2.84p from 2.37p on Monday. Britain has spent the week trading within a penny of the cheapest slot in Europe, which is why what your business pays for gas is being set by a market that is still exporting in September.

Electricity Market

Day-ahead baseload has travelled from £72.76/MWh last Friday to £154.45/MWh on Tuesday, a rise of 112% across two sessions.

Peak rose faster still, up £43.13 or 39.31% to £152.84/MWh, and the inversion has almost closed. Peak has settled below baseload on every session since 1 September: by £2.29, £23.34, £28.88, £27.92, £17.91 and now £1.61. The discount opened, widened across three sessions and has shut in two. If your load is weighted to the working day, the pricing advantage that existed a week ago has effectively gone, which is worth checking against how your business electricity supply is structured.

The forward curve rose across its whole width for a second session. Q1-27 took the largest move at £6.58 to £152.59, with Dec-26 up £6.23 to £155.23, Winter-26 £6.20 to £152.91, Q4-26 £5.83 to £153.23, Nov-26 £5.81 to £157.35 and Oct-26 £5.46 to £147.24. October is still the cheapest month on the board and now sits £7.21 below the day-ahead rather than above it.

This morning baseload is offered at £164.75 day-ahead, £160.89 on Q4-26, £160.56 on Winter-26 and £160.22 on Q1-27, between £7.6 and £10.3 above settlement. The entire peak column is blank, which matches limited liquidity this morning.

The imbalance market produced the largest miss this report has recorded. Yesterday’s part-day row for 8 September read a maximum system buy price of £202.90 and a minimum system sell price of £111.04. The maximum landed exactly, because it had already printed at 07:14 before the edition was stamped. The floor did not. 8 September settled at minus £11.96 at 13:19, which is £123.00 below the part-day figure. A part-day maximum can already be final by 09:00; a part-day minimum almost never is.

That also corrects this report’s claim yesterday that the run of negative middays had ended. It went minus £84.88 on Saturday, minus £30.00 on Sunday, positive £34.11 on Monday and back to minus £11.96 on Tuesday, on a day when day-ahead rose 21%. Today’s row reads £204.90 at 06:18 and £67.36 at 05:48, covering only the first eighteen settlement periods.

Nuclear tightens next week. Five units carry outages today for a combined 2,345 MW of impact: Heysham 2 reactor 8 at 660 MW, Torness 1 at 640 MW and Heysham 1 reactor 1 at 610 MW fully offline on planned work, plus unplanned reductions of 240 MW at Hartlepool 2 and 195 MW at Heysham 1 reactor 2, the second of those booked for 186 days. On 14 September a planned 620 MW outage at Hartlepool 2 begins, the same day French nuclear staff hold a 24-hour strike. Neither is in the prompt yet.

Wind is the near-term swing. Combined wind and solar is forecast at roughly 12,100 MWh today, falling to about 8,900 MWh tomorrow against a seasonal norm near 10,000, then running above that norm from Friday to the 16th and peaking near 12,500. Commentary puts UK wind down almost 50% to 9.2 GW today; the forecast chart puts the trough on the 10th.

The weather is not making the bull case. UK temperatures sit at or above the seasonal mean every day to 16 September, reaching 17.3°C on the 14th against a mean drifting down through 14.5°C. What is repricing this market is fuel cost, thermal availability and a war risk premium.

Oil, Carbon and Global Commodities

Oil is leading now. Brent settled at $97.92/barrel, up 0.95%, and traded through $100 this morning for the first time since 24 July. Overnight brought Iranian ballistic missile strikes on a US base in Jordan, attacks on ten ships, the US destruction of five Iranian oil tankers and the capture of an uncrewed submarine in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of world oil supply passes.

Asian LNG is the print that matters most to a UK buyer. JKM front month jumped $1.68 or 6.68% to $26.82/MMBtu after three flat sessions, and its premium over NBP spot at $25.62 widened to $1.20/MMBtu. Every cargo priced off JKM is a cargo competing harder against European terminals, and Europe is the market carrying the storage gap.

Both carbon schemes rose in step, EUA Dec-26 to €85.42 and UK ETS Dec-26 to £60.92. At Tuesday’s rate of 1.1663, the UK contract is worth about €71.05, a discount of roughly €14.37 to the EUA, essentially unchanged from €14.39 on Monday. Carbon is following fuel here rather than setting the pace.

Sterling firmed 0.0021 to 1.1663 against the euro and was flat at 1.3537 against the dollar, so none of the oil move is being absorbed on the exchange rate.

Storage and Supply Outlook

European storage stood at 66.9% full on 6 September, around 12 percentage points below the same point last year, with daily net injections running near 3.6 TWh. That is up from the 66.6% carried in yesterday’s edition.

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

Britain has been stuck at 49% for most of a fortnight while the rest of Europe kept injecting. Rough is at zero and so is Humbly Grove. The working stock sits in Stublach and HolFord at 75%, Holehouse Farm at 70%, Hornsea at 58% and Aldbrough at 51%, with Hill Top at 33%. On the LNG side South Hook is 63% full, Dragon 33% and Isle of Grain 31%.

Ten cargoes are scheduled into northwest European terminals between today and 17 September, about 993 mcm, nine of them from the United States and one from Peru. One is booked into a UK terminal, 100 mcm into Milford Haven on 15 September, revised up from the 96 mcm shown yesterday.

Britain is still exporting, at 11.50 mcm/day out through BBL to the Netherlands, with the Belgian interconnector idle for a fourth session. A market 49% full, with its largest seasonal site empty, still sending gas to the continent in September, is why the winter contracts will not follow a mild forecast down.

What This Means for Your Business

The numbers to plan around are Winter-26 at 189.40 p/therm and £152.91/MWh. Both have risen on three consecutive sessions and both are at the top of their range for this run. Nothing in the last week has improved a 2026/27 winter renewal.

The shape of the curve is the actionable part. Winter-27 settled at 121.71 p/therm and £103.11/MWh, which is 67.69p cheaper on gas and £49.80 cheaper on power than the winter immediately in front of it. The market is charging a very large premium for the winter you cannot avoid and much less for the one after it. That gap is the case for looking past a straight twelve-month renewal on any contract ending next autumn.

Timing a single purchase into this is not a strategy. Day-ahead baseload has moved minus 23%, plus 75% and plus 21% across three sessions, and the forwards that gained 3.5% yesterday were falling four sessions ago. Splitting volume across dates, which is what a staged buying approach exists to do, is the answer to a market repriced by a shooting war rather than by weather.

One practical point for anyone with a daytime-weighted load. The peak-to-baseload discount that ran for six sessions is now £1.61 and closing. If a decision was resting on it, it needs taking this week rather than next.

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 – 8 September 2026