UK Energy Market Report - 11 August 2026

Gas settled almost 10% higher across the curve on Monday as supply security concerns overrode healthy renewable output, day-ahead power jumped 38% to 125.82 £/MWh, and the Winter-26 premium over Summer-27 widened by more than 8p a therm in a single session.

Monday repriced the whole board, and it was not the prompt doing the work.

NBP Day-Ahead settled 10.40p higher at 146.65 p/therm, but the front month rose 13.77p and Q4-26 13.26p. UK day-ahead baseload power settled at 125.82 £/MWh, up 34.75 on the day.

This morning is calmer on gas and firmer on power, though liquidity is thin in both. The number worth carrying into a renewal conversation is not the day-ahead, it is the winter premium.

Gas Market

Every NBP contract out to Q1-27 gained between 10p and 14p a therm on Monday. Day-Ahead settled at 146.65p, up 10.40p or 7.6%.

The curve moved harder than the prompt. Sep-26 rose 13.77p to 149.72p, a gain of 10.1%, Oct-26 added 13.82p to 150.05p and Q4-26 rose 13.26p to 152.49p.

Winter-26 settled 12.52p higher at 149.20p. Summer-27 gained 4.40p to 95.40p and Summer-28 2.70p to 69.71p, so the far end participated but at roughly half the pace.

The move was about supply security rather than demand, with TTF front month climbing almost 10% on the session to nearly €61/MWh. Lower LNG inflows, subdued storage injections and renewed uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz all pulled the same way, and healthy renewable generation was not enough to offset them.

Norway added to it. Gassco has extended the partial Ormen Lange outage to 1 February 2027, which removes a source of winter supply flexibility rather than a volume of summer gas. Continued attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure sit behind the same risk premium.

This morning the prompt has stopped moving. At the 09:35 stamp Day-Ahead is indicated at 148.97p, up 2.32p, with Sep-26 fractionally lower at 149.61p and Oct-26, Nov-26 and Q4-26 all within 0.20p of Monday’s settlement. The firmness has shifted to the far curve, where Summer-28 is indicated 5.79p higher at 75.50p and Winter-27 2.02p up at 96.00p.

One caution on that. Summer-28 was indicated at exactly 75.50p yesterday morning too, then settled at 69.71p. Treat a single morning print at the far end as a direction, not a dealable price.

On the system, Britain opened 9 mcm/day long. At the 07:00 snapshot demand had fallen 10.98 mcm/day to 125.21, UKCS production had risen 4.00 to 84.10 and linepack was 1.12 higher at 335.95 mcm.

GASSCO puts total exit nominations at 317.7 mcm/day, up on yesterday as the Gullfaks outage was partially reduced. Langeled is down 1.10 mcm/day at 44.40 and Vesterled and Flags flat at 12.00 on that snapshot, though later nominations had flows to Britain up 3 mcm/day on higher Vesterled deliveries, expected to fall back to zero in the coming days.

UK LNG sendout is unchanged at 8.10 mcm/day, split 3.20 through Isle of Grain and 4.90 through South Hook.

The export picture has flipped. NBP settled at 146.65p against TTF at 152.14p, THE 153.43p and PEG 153.30p, so Britain is now 5.49p a therm below the Dutch hub rather than above it, and it is still sending 34.70 mcm/day to Belgium through IUK and 11.46 to the Netherlands through BBL.

Gas-for-power demand is forecast to rise by 10 mcm/day on the day-ahead, a reversal of the 13 mcm/day fall forecast yesterday, and this time it sits consistently alongside a firmer power market. Anyone tracking where the wholesale gas curve is actually pricing their next contract year should be looking at Q4-26 and Winter-26 rather than the spot headline.

The card below summarises where NBP contracts settled on Monday against the previous session.

Electricity Market

UK Day-Ahead baseload settled at 125.82 £/MWh on 10 August, up 34.75 on the day, a rise of 38%.

Day-Ahead peak settled at 118.29 £/MWh, up 64.94. That closes almost all of the inversion this report flagged on Friday, when the peak block sat 37.72 below baseload. It is now 7.53 below, still inverted but no longer extreme.

Forward power rose in line with gas rather than ahead of it. Sep-26 baseload added 4.47 to 119.61 £/MWh, Oct-26 5.53 to 117.31, Q4-26 5.22 to 123.71 and Win-26 5.08 to 121.91.

This morning the curve has firmed again on thin volume. Day-Ahead is offered at 136.25 £/MWh, up 10.43, with Sep-26 at 126.18, Oct-26 at 120.83, Q4-26 at 127.42 and Win-26 at 125.75.

A note on yesterday’s numbers is owed here. This report published a 132.00 £/MWh morning indication for Monday’s day-ahead baseload, which settled at 125.82, while the gas indication of 141.48p settled at 146.65p. The morning stamp overshot on power and undershot on gas, which is why both are labelled indicative.

The balancing market tells the clearest story. On 10 August the daily minimum System Sell Price was 47.77 £/MWh at 13:19 and the daily maximum System Buy Price 227.00 at 21:19, against minimum sell prices of 0.00, minus 14.47 and minus 14.07 on the three preceding days. Negative pricing has gone, but midday solar still pulled Monday down to 47.77 before the evening peak cleared at 227.00.

So far today the minimum sell price is 101.22 £/MWh at 08:18 and the maximum buy price 165.00 at 06:48. The floor has lifted sharply, though that covers only the first eighteen settlement periods.

Supply is the reason the evening peaks are expensive. Hartlepool 2 has been off since 7 August for a planned 16-day outage removing 620 MW, and Heysham 1 reactor 1 is running at 498 of 610 MW.

It gets tighter. Heysham 1 reactor 1 comes fully off on 17 August for 15 days, Torness 1 on 21 August for 17 days, and Heysham 2 reactor 8 on 4 September for 80 days. Wind generation is forecast below seasonal norms for the foreseeable future, and temperatures rise through today, peak on Wednesday and Thursday, then cool back towards seasonal averages from Friday.

Oil, Carbon and Global Commodities

Brent M+1 settled at 87.72 $/barrel on Monday, up 4.17 or 5.0%, and has moved higher again this morning.

Hormuz is the reason. President Trump responded on Monday to Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement by demanding compensation for those killed in wars, attacks and protests, which has further reduced expectations of the Strait reopening. Transits fell to six vessels on Monday against a ten-day average of around eleven, the lowest since mid-July.

Coal API2 for Cal-27 added 5.56 to $124.38/tonne, up 4.7%, and the LNG complex moved with gas. JKM front month rose to $21.44/MMBtu and TTF spot to $20.55, both close to 10% higher, with NBP spot at $19.80 and Henry Hub firmer at $2.72.

Carbon was the one market that went the other way. EUA Dec-26 fell 1.02 to €82.27 and UK ETS Dec-26 lost 1.48 to £59.02, down 1.2% and 2.4% respectively.

At Monday’s 1.1687 sterling rate the European allowance is worth about £70.39, so the UK scheme is trading roughly £11.37 a tonne below its European equivalent, a discount that has widened from £10.93 on Friday.

That divergence is worth naming. Energy commodities rose hard on supply risk while both carbon markets fell, which means Monday’s move was priced as a molecule problem rather than a compliance-cost problem.

Sterling firmed slightly, to 1.1687 against the euro and 1.3503 against the dollar.

Commodity	Price	Change (day)
Brent Crude (M+1)	$87.72/barrel	+5.0%
Coal API2 (Cal-27)	$124.38/tonne	+4.7%
EUA Carbon (Dec-26)	€82.27/tonne	-1.2%
UK ETS (Dec-26)	£59.02/tonne	-2.4%
JKM LNG (front-month)	$21.44/MMBtu	+9.8%
TTF Gas (spot)	$20.55/MMBtu	+9.8%

Storage and Supply Outlook

European inventories stood at 58.8% full, up marginally on the 58.1% recorded for 5 August.

The concern is no longer the level so much as the arithmetic of the remaining injection season. Analysts now expect Europe to struggle to refill much beyond 70 to 75% before winter without a sustained increase in LNG imports.

That is the single most important line in today’s data, and it is what the 13p move on Q4-26 and Winter-26 is pricing.

British storage is unchanged in shape and still patchy. South Hook sits at 75% full, Holehouse Farm and Stublach both at 70%, Holford 60%, Aldbrough 49%, Hill Top 44%, Hornsea 40%, Isle of Grain 39% and Dragon 33%. Rough and Humbly Grove remain at zero.

The LNG schedule into North West Europe carries ten cargoes to 19 August, six of them American. Eemshaven takes 100 mcm today, Gate 104 mcm tomorrow and Wilhelmshaven 101 mcm from Norway on 13 August.

One arrival stands out. Gate is due 103 mcm from the Russian Federation on 15 August, the first Russian cargo to appear on this schedule in some weeks.

Once again, not a single cargo is booked into a British terminal. That is why UK sendout sits at 8.10 mcm/day while Britain exports more than 46 mcm/day to the continent, and it is the structural reason NBP has now slipped below TTF.

What This Means for Your Business

Monday was not a spot event. It was a curve event, and that matters more for anyone renewing this autumn.

Day-ahead gas rose 7.6%, but Q4-26 rose 9.5% and Sep-26 10.1%. The contracts a business actually buys moved further than the one quoted in headlines.

The clearest way to see it is the seasonal spread. Winter-26 settled at 149.20p against Summer-27 at 95.40p, a step down of 53.80p per therm once this winter clears.

On Friday that same spread was 45.68p. The winter premium widened by 8.12p a therm in one session, and it is the largest single line in any autumn renewal quote.

For a business with a Q4 start date, that is the number to watch, not the day-ahead. It is also the argument for splitting a winter requirement across several purchase dates instead of pricing the whole volume on one screen, because a single session just moved the cost of that decision by 8p a therm.

On power, the peak block is the correction worth registering. Friday’s 53.35 £/MWh peak was a solar artefact, and it has already gone, replaced by 118.29 on Monday. Nothing about a business’s evening or overnight load got cheaper in between.

Storage is the medium-term signal. If Europe genuinely finishes the injection season at 70 to 75% rather than the 90% it has been used to targeting, the winter risk premium currently sitting in Q4-26 and Q1-27 does not unwind quietly.

The watch items this week are the heatwave peaking Wednesday and Thursday, wind staying below seasonal norms, Vesterled deliveries expected back to zero, Hormuz transit counts, European injection rates, and Heysham 1 coming fully off on 17 August.

For a view tailored to your consumption profile and renewal window, speak to one of our energy consultants today.

Previous report: UK Energy Market Report – 10 August 2026