UK Energy Market Report - 23 September 2026

Ten of eleven NBP gas contracts claw back a fraction of the 21 September fall, day-ahead power drops £36.68 as the wind returns, and the imbalance market prints £594.00/MWh on Tuesday evening

Gas bought a little of Monday back. Ten of the eleven NBP contracts settled higher on 22 September, with day-ahead up 2.40p or 1.31% to 185.00 p/therm. Set against the session before, the rebound is slight: Oct-26 recovered 0.78p of the 16.56p it lost, and Winter-26 0.46p of 15.35p.

Power went the other way at the prompt and nowhere at all on the curve. Day-ahead baseload settled at £161.75/MWh for Wednesday delivery, down £36.68 or 18.49%, and peak fell £47.23 to £155.11, back below baseload after one session above it. Q4-26, Winter-26 and Q1-27 baseload each moved exactly four pence.

The session’s real number came from the imbalance market, which printed a System Buy Price of £594.00/MWh at 20:48 on Tuesday evening, more than double any other print this month.

Gas Market

The recovery was broad and shallow. Day-ahead rose 2.40p to 185.00p, Oct-26 0.78p to 182.38p, Q4-26 0.58p to 185.17p, Dec-26 0.54p to 187.46p, Winter-26 0.46p to 184.19p, Nov-26 0.40p to 185.69p and Q1-27 0.35p to 183.18p. Winter-28 was the only contract to fall, by 0.16p to 88.69p.

Measured against Monday, those are token gains. Day-ahead won back 17% of what it had lost the session before. Oct-26 won back under 5%, Q4-26 under 4% and Winter-26 3%. The selling of 21 September is still almost entirely in place across the winter strip, and one quiet session up does not change that.

The far curve did proportionally more. Winter-27 rose 1.05p to 127.66p, Summer-28 0.28p to 82.20p and Summer-27 0.23p to 130.86p.

Winter-27 is now the only contract on the board that is dearer than it was a week ago. At 127.66p it sits 0.22p above its 15 September close of 127.44p, while Winter-26 is 17.34p lower over the same stretch and Oct-26 16.03p lower. Everything the past week has taken out of this market has come out of the contracts covering the coming winter, and none of it out of the one after.

Britain is still the cheapest of the seven European hubs, though the discount has shrunk by more than a third in a session. At 185.00p, NBP sits 2.10p under the Dutch TTF at 187.10p, against 3.30p on Monday. Italy’s PSV is dearest at 194.58p, 9.58p above NBP, with Spain’s PVB at 192.95p, Austria’s VTP at 188.11p, Germany’s THE at 187.92p and France’s PEG at 186.53p.

Yesterday’s morning marks split cleanly between the prompt and the curve. Day-ahead was indicated at 184.99p and settled at 185.00p, one hundredth of a penny out and the closest print this report has carried. Every forward mark was long: Oct-26 was shown at 183.08p against a 182.38p close, Winter-26 at 184.96p against 184.19p, Winter-27 at 135.00p against 127.66p and Summer-28 at 91.24p against 82.20p.

At 09:33 this morning the curve is marked up and the prompt down. Day-ahead is indicated at 184.20p, 0.80p under yesterday’s settlement, while Oct-26 is at 184.08p and Winter-26 at 186.21p, 1.70p and 2.02p above their closes. The commentary published alongside these marks reads the spot as trading a little above yesterday’s close; the indication table has it below. Both can hold at their own timestamp, and the table is what is quoted here. The Summer-28 mark of 106.99p is 24.79p above its settlement and is better read as the absence of a price than as one.

Norway is the supply story, and the headline figure and the British figure point different ways. Total Norwegian exit nominations fell to 226.1 mcm/day this morning from 263.9 yesterday, with maintenance peaking today at 145.8 mcm/day of curtailed capacity, fresh outages at Kårstø, Åsgard and Skarv, and the Troll compressor failure still unresolved. Most of the planned work is due to finish tomorrow.

Deliveries into Britain are a separate question. At the 07:00 read Langeled is at 14.00 mcm/day and Vesterled and Flags at 6.00, 20.00 in total, which is exactly where the same two stood at 07:00 yesterday. The published change of minus 8.00 compares this morning against a 14:00 reading yesterday afternoon, by which point Vesterled and Flags had run up to 14.00. Like for like on the morning stamp, Norwegian supply into Britain has not moved.

The system opened around 17 mcm/day long. Demand is 131.79 mcm/day against 143.59 at yesterday’s afternoon read, UKCS production 90.80 against 88.40, and linepack has eased 1.13 to 352.73. The number that stands out is exports: 9.02 mcm/day to the Netherlands through BBL and 25.40 to Belgium through IUK, 34.42 in total against 21.53 at the same stamp yesterday. Britain is short of nothing and selling hard into a continent whose hubs are now only 2.10p dearer.

UK LNG send-out has fallen to 13.00 mcm/day, Isle of Grain and South Hook 6.50 each, from 16.10 at yesterday’s afternoon read. Across Europe send-out reached 294.1 mcm/day on 22 September, above the month-to-date average, with France and Italy the strongest.

Electricity Market

Day-ahead baseload settled at £161.75/MWh for Wednesday delivery, down £36.68 or 18.49%, and peak fell £47.23 to £155.11. Peak is back below baseload, by £6.64, after a single session above it. Wind is the whole explanation.

That pair has now settled at £103.95, £28.00, £198.43 and £161.75 in four consecutive sessions, a range of £170.43. Over the same four sessions the gas that sets the marginal plant went from 191.60p to 185.00p, a net move of 6.60p. Prompt power is a weather price and very little else.

The forward curve did almost nothing. Q4-26, Winter-26 and Q1-27 baseload each rose exactly four pence, to £147.34, £148.17 and £149.02, which is another way of reporting that nothing changed hands. Oct-26 added £0.32 to £142.83, Summer-27 £1.36 to £103.46, Winter-27 £0.36 to £105.43 and Summer-28 £0.74 to £70.72. Nov-26 fell £0.68 to £150.13 and Winter-28 a penny to £79.65.

The peak forwards rose a little more freely. Oct-26 gained £1.20 to £164.21, Nov-26 £0.83 to £176.94, Q4-26 £0.80 to £171.85, Winter-26 £0.71 to £171.41 and Q1-27 £0.63 to £170.96.

Yesterday’s power marks repeated the gas pattern exactly. Day-ahead baseload was offered at £162.00 and settled at £161.75, out by 25 pence. The forwards were all long again: Oct-26 was marked £145.00 against a £142.83 close, Nov-26 £154.50 against £150.13, and Winter-26 £151.09 against £148.17. Two mornings of a near-exact prompt and an over-marked curve is a coincidence and not a pattern; this same index has missed the day-ahead by more than £20 inside a single session before now.

At 09:33 this morning day-ahead baseload is offered at £150.50, £11.25 below yesterday’s settlement, with wind still building. Oct-26 is marked at £145.00, Nov-26 at £154.25, Q4-26 at £150.00 and Winter-26 at £149.75, between £1.58 and £4.12 above their closes.

The imbalance market is where Tuesday actually happened, and this report called it badly wrong yesterday. The part-day row published here read £190.00 at the top and £123.33 at the bottom. 22 September settled with a maximum System Buy Price of £594.00 at 20:48 and a minimum System Sell Price of £103.05 at 11:48. The ceiling was £404.00 above the part-day figure, by a distance the largest miss this report has recorded, and it printed at a quarter to nine in the evening, eleven hours after the stamp that produced the number published.

£594.00 is the highest System Buy Price of the month by more than double. The next highest in September is £275.00 on the 16th, and Monday, with day-ahead settled at £198.43, topped out at £239.00. Tuesday evening was short at exactly the point in the day when the wind had not yet arrived and the day-ahead price had already cleared high, and the imbalance market charged for it.

Today’s part-day row reads £206.00 at 06:18 and £105.54 at 08:18. Neither is settled, and on yesterday’s evidence the maximum in particular should be read as a floor rather than as a figure.

Wind is why the prompt fell and why it should stay lower. Combined wind and solar generation is forecast near 9,150 MWh today, dipping to about 8,100 tomorrow, recovering through roughly 9,000 on the 25th and 26th, peaking near 11,500 on the 27th, easing to about 8,600 on the 28th, then climbing hard to around 14,000 by the 30th. The seasonal norm across that window sits close to 10,400, so output is below par on most days in it, but the last three days of the month are well above.

Temperatures stay above the seasonal mean on every day to 30 September, near 16.4°C today and about 14.6°C tomorrow against a mean easing from 13.5°C to 12.9°C, so heating demand is not the pressure this week. Nuclear outages are unchanged again at 2,725 MW across five units, as they have been since 16 September. Torness 1 and Heysham 1 reactor 1 are due back around 25 September and Hartlepool 2 at the end of the month, but Heysham 1 reactor 1 goes straight out again on 29 September for a hundred days, that time at a reduced impact of 112 MW.

Oil, Carbon and Global Commodities

Brent settled at $99.25/barrel on 22 September, down $1.09 or 1.09% and a fifth consecutive fall. That run has now given back the whole of the rally that carried it from $101.21 on 9 September to $108.75 on the 15th, and leaves it $3.73 above its lowest close of the month, $95.52 on 3 September. The President’s warning to Iran on Tuesday sat alongside his own suggestion that an agreement may be close; the oil market has so far taken the second half of that more seriously than the first.

Coal was the day’s largest mover in percentage terms, up $2.30 or 1.75% to $133.91 a tonne on Cal-27, which ends three sessions of falls and still leaves it $1.82 under its 15 September close.

The LNG benchmarks were quiet. JKM added 6 cents to $26.05/MMBtu, NBP spot 28 cents to $24.68 and TTF 10 cents to $25.00, while Henry Hub eased 3 cents to $2.90. Asia’s premium over Britain narrowed to $1.37 from $1.59. The commentary published with these figures puts the November JKM at $25.881 and describes it as down about 3.5%; the settlement table has it up 6 cents, and the table is the basis quoted here.

Both carbon markets edged up and the gap between them did not move at all. EUA Dec-26 gained €0.14 to €86.73 and UK ETS Dec-26 £0.12 to £58.12. At 1.1658 the UK allowance is worth about €67.76, a €18.97 discount to the European price, which is to the penny where it stood on Monday.

Sterling was unchanged at 1.1658 against the euro and eased 0.0024 to 1.3339 against the dollar, a small extra cost on dollar-priced oil and LNG.

Storage and Supply Outlook

British storage slipped a point to 53% on the country map and remains the emptiest of the seven readings shown. France stands at 79%, Italy at 85%, Spain at 73% and Germany at 56%, with the two overlapping Benelux labels at 54% and 59%.

The individual sites came down harder than the country figure suggests. Stublach lost five points to 79% and Aldbrough four to 57%, Hill Top three to 41%, and South Hook and Isle of Grain a point each to 67% and 24%. Hornsea added a point to 66%. Dragon at 33%, Holehouse Farm at 70% and HolFord at 75% were unchanged, Rough remains empty and Humbly Grove sits at 1%.

That is a broad drawdown rather than one site sending out, and it arrives on a morning when demand fell nearly 12 mcm and the system opened long. The pull is the export route to Belgium and the Netherlands, not British consumption.

Eight cargoes carrying about 695 mcm are due at northwest European terminals between today and 26 September, and two of them are British: 106 mcm at Milford Haven from the United States today and 80 mcm at Isle of Grain from Algeria on the 25th. Four of the eight come from the United States, three from Algeria and one from Russia.

The Norwegian maintenance that has shaped the past week peaks today and most of it clears tomorrow. What does not clear is the Troll compressor failure, which continues to limit network availability with no end date attached to it. Exit nominations at 226.1 mcm/day should be the low point of this episode, and the question for the rest of the week is how much of the 140 mcm/day currently out returns on schedule.

What This Means for Your Business

For fixed-price buyers the reference points are Winter-26 at 184.19 p/therm and £148.17/MWh, about 6.28 p/kWh for gas and 14.8 p/kWh for power at wholesale, before network costs, levies and supplier margin.

A week ago those same two contracts closed at 201.53p and £161.05/MWh. A winter price struck on today’s curve is 17.34p and £12.88 better than one struck on 15 September, about 8.6% on gas and 8.0% on power, and all of it has arrived in five sessions. Nobody called the direction of any of those five, which is the argument for buying in tranches across several dates rather than backing a single morning.

The two winters keep converging, and quickly. Winter-26 now stands 56.53p above Winter-27 on gas against 74.09p a week ago, and £42.74 above it on power against £54.81. A twenty-four month price still buys a discount against a twelve month one, but that discount has thinned by roughly a quarter in a week. Anyone holding off on a two-year deal until it looked obviously cheap has spent the week watching the reason to hold off get smaller.

The £594.00 print on Tuesday evening is the number worth keeping. Day-ahead baseload for that day settled at £198.43, which is high but budgetable; the imbalance price at 20:48 was three times it. A half-hourly site on pass-through terms pays the second number for whatever it draws out of line with its notified position, and no amount of attention to the headline unit rate touches that exposure. It is a reminder that the way an electricity contract handles the prompt and the imbalance can matter more to the final bill than the rate on the front page.

Four consecutive day-ahead settlements of £103.95, £28.00, £198.43 and £161.75, against a fuel that moved a net 6.60p a therm across the same four days, make the same point from the other direction. If your costs are exposed to the prompt, the forward curve is not the thing to watch.

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, 22 September 2026