What this shows you
Live, hour-by-hour wholesale electricity prices for Poland and every major European bidding zone. This is not the rate on your bill. It is the market price at which power plants, factories, and energy traders buy and sell electricity. Your supplier marks it up, then adds grid fees, taxes, and a profit margin.
For Poland we pull directly from PSE, the national grid operator. For the rest of Europe we use Energy-Charts.info (run by Fraunhofer ISE), which republishes the official day-ahead prices for DE-LU, FR, ES, IT, NL, BE, AT, CZ, SK, HU, RO, SE3, NO2, DK1, FI - no API key, fully public.
Why you care: when you know the wholesale price, you can time big loads (washing machine, EV charging, heat pump) to cheap hours, size up a dynamic tariff against a flat one, and understand the floor under your bill before negotiating with a supplier.
How to use it
- Pick a country: PL, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, AT, CZ, SE, NO. Every entry is live, no placeholders.
- Pick a time range: "Now" highlights the current hour, "Today" shows all 24 hours, "Tomorrow" appears once auction results are published (typically around 13:00 CET the day before), "Last 7 days" gives you a trend view.
- The big number at the top is the current hour, shown in PLN per MWh and converted to EUR per MWh side by side. Min, max, and average for the visible range sit just below.
- The chart shows each hour separately. Lows are typically overnight (00 to 05) and midday (10 to 14, when solar floods the grid); peaks are morning (07 to 09) and evening (18 to 21).
- Remember: wholesale price is not the final price. Add your supplier markup, grid distribution fee (around 0.30 PLN/kWh in Poland), excise duty, and VAT to get the all-in cost on your meter.
- Data is cached for one hour, so refreshing rapidly is harmless. We pull fresh numbers from PSE once per hour.
- Tomorrow's full hourly schedule appears each day around 13:00 to 14:00 Central European Time, when the day-ahead auction closes.
When this is useful
Real situations where seeing the wholesale price changes a decision:
- You are on a dynamic tariff: if your contract bills you at the hourly wholesale price plus a fixed margin (the model offered by EnergaSlim, EneaPradDynamiczny, several DE / AT / NL retailers, Octopus Agile in the UK), then this number is the foundation of your bill. Check it before turning on the oven.
- Scheduling a washing machine or dishwasher: each cycle eats 2 to 3 kWh. A 200 EUR/MWh gap between 13:00 and 19:00 turns into 40 to 60 cents per load, which adds up to a meaningful amount per year just by shifting the start time.
- Charging an electric vehicle: a full charge is 50 to 80 kWh. The gap between the cheap overnight window (often 30 to 50 EUR/MWh) and the evening peak (150 to 220 EUR/MWh) is real money per charge.
- Home battery storage: you need to know when to charge and when to discharge. This curve is the exact schedule you will program into the controller.
- Solar with net-billing: in net-billing schemes, exports to the grid between 10:00 and 14:00 (when the sun is strongest) are valued at the hourly wholesale price. Summer midday prices can dip to zero or negative, so a 5 kWh export earns close to nothing instead of a few euro.
- Negotiating a supplier contract: once you see the annual wholesale average (typically around 80 to 110 EUR/MWh across the EU in 2024 and 2025) and compare it to the fixed-price tariff your supplier is offering, you can price the "peace of mind premium" they are charging and decide whether it is worth it.
Related tools: electricity cost calculator, solar and storage calculator, battery pack calculator, currency converter.