Germany Electricity Prices & Generation — SMARD Power Data

Official source. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor gives you German electricity market data from SMARD, the market-data platform of the Bundesnetzagentur (the German Federal Network Agency), as clean time-series records. It covers 36 series in four groups:

Group	Series
prices	Day-ahead prices for Germany/Luxembourg, the average of its neighbours, and 14 neighbouring zones (Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Denmark 1 and 2, France, Hungary, Northern Italy, Netherlands, Norway 2, Poland, Sweden 4, Slovenia) in €/MWh
generation	Actual generation by source in MWh: biomass, hydropower, wind offshore, wind onshore, photovoltaics, other renewable, lignite, hard coal, fossil gas, pumped storage, other conventional
consumption	Grid load, residual load and pumped-storage consumption in MWh
forecast	Day-ahead generation forecasts: total, wind and solar combined, wind offshore, wind onshore, photovoltaics, other

Values come hourly, quarter-hourly or daily. Day-ahead prices start in October 2018, when the Germany/Luxembourg price zone began; they run up to the next day as soon as the auction result is published. Each record is one value for one series and one time interval.

Every series id and label in this actor was checked on 27 September 2026 against SMARD's own download service. Each series was matched value for value with the column SMARD labels for it — for example Germany/Luxembourg at 150.71 €/MWh for the first hour of 28 September 2026 in both.

Who buys this and for what job

• Energy traders, utilities and suppliers tracking German and neighbouring day-ahead prices next to wind, solar and load.
• Industrial energy buyers and procurement teams timing consumption and checking price exposure.
• Battery, flexibility and renewable-project developers modelling spreads, solar and wind output and residual load.
• Analysts, researchers and journalists covering the German energy transition with official figures.
• Data teams feeding dashboards and models without handling SMARD's weekly file layout.

Sample output

{
  "record_id": "SMARD:4169:DE:hour:1790629200000",
  "series": "price_de_lu",
  "category": "Day-ahead prices",
  "label": "Germany/Luxembourg",
  "unit": "€/MWh",
  "area": "Germany/Luxembourg",
  "resolution": "hour",
  "timestamp_utc": "2026-09-28T21:00:00Z",
  "timestamp_ms": 1790629200000,
  "value": 181.29,
  "chart_url": "https://www.smard.de/app/chart_data/4169/DE/4169_DE_hour_1790546400000.json",
  "source": "Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de — electricity market data (https://www.smard.de)",
  "licence": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) — SMARD states that its market data 'is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence' and should be attributed to 'Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de'.",
  "attribution": "Source: Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de (CC BY 4.0); reformatted by NexGen Signal.",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-28T03:48:01Z"
}

Pricing

Apify plan	Price per record
Free	$0.05
Bronze	$0.045
Silver	$0.04
Gold and above	$0.0335

You pay only for records delivered to your dataset — one record per value. maxRecords caps what a run can cost: 500 records cost $25 on the Free plan. Empty intervals (for example load that is not yet published) are skipped and never charged.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
series	Groups (prices, generation, consumption, forecast) and/or single series such as price_de_lu, price_fr, gen_wind_onshore, gen_photovoltaics, load_grid, load_residual, fc_wind_and_pv	price_de_lu, load_grid, gen_wind_onshore, gen_photovoltaics
resolution	hour, quarterhour or day	hour
lastDays	Only the last N days	last 7 days if no dates are given
fromDate, toDate	First and last day, UTC (YYYY-MM-DD)	7 days ago → tomorrow
maxRecords	Maximum records delivered and billed	500

Newest values come first; at each time step the series follow the order you listed them.

Example — every series, daily, for January 2025:

{"series": ["prices", "generation", "consumption", "forecast"], "resolution": "day", "fromDate": "2025-01-01", "toDate": "2025-01-31", "maxRecords": 5000}

(That returned 1,116 values: 36 series × 31 days.)

Example — tomorrow's quarter-hourly German price curve plus the last two days:

{"series": ["price_de_lu"], "resolution": "quarterhour", "lastDays": 2, "maxRecords": 1000}

Output

Field	Meaning
record_id	SMARD:<series id>:DE:<resolution>:<timestamp> — unique per value
series, category, label, unit	The series key, SMARD's category and English label, and the unit
area	For prices, SMARD's zone label (a bidding zone, or "∅ DE/LU neighbours" for the neighbours' average); Germany for generation, load and forecasts
resolution	hour, quarterhour or day
timestamp_utc, timestamp_ms	Start of the interval, in UTC and in SMARD's Unix milliseconds
value	The value as SMARD publishes it
chart_url, source, licence, attribution, observed_at	Provenance on every record

Values are SMARD's, unchanged. Hourly and daily values are the ones SMARD itself shows (its download files call them "calculated resolutions").

Cost guidance

A week of one hourly series is 168 records ($5.63 on Gold). A day of every series hourly is about 860 records ($29). A year of the German hourly price is 8,760 records ($293); the same year at daily resolution is 365 ($12). Quarter-hourly data is four times the hourly count. Start with the series you need and daily or hourly resolution; switch to quarter-hourly only where you need it.

Tips

• Daily price feed: schedule a run each afternoon with series: ["prices"] and lastDays: 1; it picks up the next day's auction results as soon as SMARD publishes them.
• Spreads: request price_de_lu together with a neighbour such as price_fr or price_at and subtract by timestamp_utc.
• Renewable share: divide gen_wind_onshore + gen_wind_offshore + gen_photovoltaics by load_grid for the same interval.
• Forecast error: compare fc_wind_onshore with gen_wind_onshore for the same hours.

Series keys at a glance

Prices: price_de_lu, price_de_lu_neighbours_avg, price_at, price_be, price_ch, price_cz, price_dk1, price_dk2, price_fr, price_hu, price_it_north, price_nl, price_no2, price_pl, price_se4, price_si. Generation: gen_biomass, gen_hydropower, gen_wind_offshore, gen_wind_onshore, gen_photovoltaics, gen_other_renewable, gen_lignite, gen_hard_coal, gen_fossil_gas, gen_pumped_storage, gen_other_conventional. Consumption: load_grid, load_residual, load_pumped_storage. Forecasts: fc_total, fc_wind_and_pv, fc_wind_offshore, fc_wind_onshore, fc_photovoltaics, fc_other.

How a run works

The actor checks robots.txt (smard.de serves none — HTTP 404 — which is recorded in the run receipt as "no policy", not as permission), reads SMARD's index for each series to find the weekly (or, for daily data, yearly) files that cover your dates, and reads those files newest first. Records are pushed to your dataset first and charged only after they are delivered; if you set a maximum charge, the run stops cleanly when it is reached. Test runs took 4–30 seconds. Every run saves a receipt (RUN_RECEIPT) with the robots decision, files read and empty intervals skipped. If SMARD cannot be reached after several retries, the run ends with a clear message and nothing is charged.

Honest limitations

• Times are UTC. SMARD's website shows German local time; timestamp_utc 2026-09-27T22:00:00Z is midnight on 28 September in Berlin.
• Prices from October 2018. The Germany/Luxembourg price zone began then; earlier dates return no price values.
• Quarter-hour versus hour. In SMARD's quarter-hourly price files, the four quarters of an hour carry the same price up to September 2025 and different prices from October 2025, when the day-ahead auction moved to 15-minute products. quarterhour gives those values; hour gives SMARD's hourly values.
• Latest values fill in over time. Load and generation for the most recent hours are not published yet when prices for the next day already are; those empty intervals are skipped (161 in one 7-day test run). Re-read recent days later if you need them complete.
• Germany-wide only. Generation, load and forecasts are for the whole of Germany; the four transmission-system-operator areas are not included.
• No nuclear series. German nuclear generation ended in April 2023, and SMARD serves no current chart file for it, so it is not offered.

Licence and attribution

SMARD states that its market data "is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence" and should be attributed to "Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de". Every record carries the credit Source: Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de (CC BY 4.0); reformatted by NexGen Signal. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Bundesnetzagentur.

Differentiation

Power-market actors on the Store — such as scrapemint/european-electricity-prices, jungle_synthesizer/entsoe-european-power-market-scraper and ninhothedev/energy-charts-scraper — draw on ENTSO-E or third-party portals. This actor reads the German regulator's own platform, with prices, generation by source, load and forecasts in one input, every series id verified against SMARD's own labels, and an open licence you can pass on with attribution.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of NexGen Signal — official-source data products, no API keys, pay per record. Related actors:

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• EU Industrial Emissions Records — EEA IED Facilities
• ECB Bank Lending & Deposit Rate Records — Euro Area MIR
• National Macro Indicator Records — World Bank